interview by Hell and Bobzz
[ Finally, the ATR interview... I made it the backstage, sometime after their fourth show in their brazilian tour... It was a great pleasure to me to talk to the four people of Atari Teenage Riot: Alec Empire, Hanin Elias, Carl Crack and Nick, the new member. All of them were very happy and patient, and Alec and Hanin were two of the sweetest people I've met in my life... (the pictures of the show had not been scanned yet... please come back in some weeks) ]
I
understand Atari has a very strong punk ideology. You have a
message in your music. I’d like to know exactly what to do
you want to spread to the people through your band.
Nick: I think that the main message is to tell the people that they should riot, and they should stand up for their rights, and they shouldn’t get opressed by the state police, and they should fuck the media industry, like the mainstream and all that stuff...
Ok. I am sure you didn’t sell yourselves, but anyway, you are on MTV, and have a very large audience. How do you face that?
Carl: First of all, we don’t make compromises musically or in our lyrics... I don’t really see us as mainstream, because we make no compromises to get into like MTV or so...
Alec:
MTV, for example, we didn’t make any compromisses to get
there. We don’t make compromisses to sell more records. I
know it’s a danger if you are on MTV, you could come across
different - people think "hmmm - MTV showed them". For
years, MTV didn’t show us, but now, we have so much support,
than our records sell more, and now MTV can’t ignore us. So
the thing is - instead of keeping us down, they want to absorve
it, to get like a piece of the cake. And we say "ok, fuck
these people". If they change for us, I don’t care, but
we’ll never change for them. If they don’t want to play
our videos anymore, I’ll say "fuck you", I
won’t make something nice just because I want MTV.
But anyway, you sell a lot - it’s better to spread your message to that lot of people that to spread it to twenty people...
Carl: Of course, it’s a good thing to come across the world. We see many people ready for our music, and that all is a good feeling.
OK. I’d like to know a little about Digital Hardcore. I’ve just bought a Shizuo CD, it’s very strange... I’d like to know the concept behind Digital Hardcore.
Carl: We
say that Digital Hardcore is like very extreme music. We are a
like abunch of people going to extreme directions, but with
diferente faces.
In your music, there are lot of samples of bands as Slayer, Sex Pistols and Nirvana. What about your influences?
Carl: My influences come from a hip-hop background, old-school hip-hop like Africa Bambataa and Grandmaster Flash, stuff like that, and of course the main thing was Public enemy for me. And bands with punk background, like X-Ray Specs and the like...
And what do you think about the hardcore scene???
Hanin: It still stays in the eighties, and it’s very sad.
Alec: We see all
that stuff we do as the next step of hardcore. It’s good
that these bands exist, but sometimes I don’t know if that
music is in someway a bit conservative, because it has been there
for a long time and there are has been no changes, really, so
something that can’t change.
Hanin: I was in the hardcore/punk scene, and after a while, people said "oh, come on, Hanin, you can’t listen to computer music". They are really conservative actually, because they don’t to change as well, and that’s the boring thing about it...
And what do you think about the techno scene?
Hanin: It has no meaning at all. It has no movement which want to change anything, it’s like a movement really conservative.
Alec: I think
the techno problem is that people use it to escape - they just go
to a rave, take some drugs - and maybe that’s the only good
thinks about raves - and then, on monday morning, they go back to
work, and there’s no change in the society, techno
hasn’t achieved anything - it’s just like bad disco
music. We were very euphoric about it, when techno started, we
thought it was very good, but then it ended like this hippie
bullshit, so, techno has became our enemy.
Nick, are you a new Atari member?
Nick: Yes. I joined them last year, i think that in April, and I did the Beck tour with Atari Teenage Riot, when Hanin was pregnant, and after that tour Alec called me. In that tour, i was just filling Hanin’s place, because she couldn’t come to the tour, so, after the Beck tour Alec called me and asked me to join Atari Teenage Riot because he has been thinking of a forth member in the band.
And what exactly do you do in the band?
Nick: On stage I am triggering the samples, and I am doing the noise stuff and the drum machines onstage, and the mixer, and I am doing the shoutings as well, but today I couldn’t do them because of... [points at her throat].
Do you sing with them?
Nick: Yes, I sing with them. I wasn’t involved with "The Future of War" album, that was before I joined and we are going to record a new album, I think in May or June, or something, and I’ll be in the album as well, doing the sounds and vocals.
Last Question: What did you think about playing in Brazil? Did you ever think about that in the beginning?
Hanin: Brazil is great! This was the best show we did in Brazil so far.
Carl: Is was great tonight, A great concert...
Alec: We always wanted to play in a lot of countries, and in the last three years we have been in America a lot, and in Asia, like in Japan and is southwest Asia, and this year we went to Brazil, and Australia, it had the idea to do that, but sometimes you can’t really plan it, because no one wants you, but it was the right time to come over.
And do you plan to come back?
Alec: Yeah, why not? It would be good...
