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Interview with

Robert Enforsen (vocals) and Richard Jomshof (synths) of Elegant Machinery

ELEGANT MACHINERY is a Swedish synth-pop band which started back in 1988. The members of the band are Robert Enforsen on vocals, Richard Jomshof (synth) and Johan Malmgren on synth and vocals. Founding member Leslie Bayne is back on stage with the band as well. It has been 10 years since they last released a record but last year they released their new album ‘A Soft Exchange’. I had the pleasure of meeting Robert and Richard for an interview during the Arvika festival and during the interview we learned that they are working on new material. So, all the ELEGANT MACHINERY fans out there keep your eyes and ears open for news about the band!

Reflections of Darkness (RoD): How would you like to introduce your band for those who have not heard about it before?
Robert: We are a band who plays pretty ordinary pop music, music that actually can be presented on any instrument but we use synthesizers and of course put a lot of energy on that and it’s possibilities.
Richard: Yeah we play synth-pop music and we have actually been told by some record companies where they more or less has asked us if we can imagine to change our style, they have said that if we change our style then they would sign us and we would become big but never if we sound like this. Synth-pop music has for a very long time had pretty bad reputation but it was here we starter sometime in the end of the 80´s because we missed the early synth-pop-movement which were very big with bands like Human League, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode and so on. That is was inspired us and that is the stuff that still inspires us, even if we have grown up and listen to different music now it’s still the soul of ELEGANT MACHINERY but of course it is pop music on synthesizers.

RoD: How did you come up with the name ELEGANT MACHINERY, is there a story behind it?
Richard: Yeah there is a story behind the name, we thought about names when we started the band in 1987-1988, we thought really hard and for a short time we called ourselves Pole Position that is a pretty bad name if you ask me…
Robert: …that was before I joined the band…
Richard: Yeah it was before Robert was in the band. The thing is that both I and Robert are huge fans of an old band - Data - and their third record had the title ‘Elegant Machinery’.
Robert: We are thieves…
*Everyone laughs*
Richard: Oh well the thing was that we thought it was such an incredible good name.
Robert: Yeah and it really attest what we do and our visions!
Richard: We felt like “can we not just take this name” I mean, all the other bands have taken their names from somewhere and it was there we found our name. It just felt right; the pieces fell in place in a way. The name sums up the music that we wanted to do so it’s Data’s third record name which we have take straight from the cover. The band member Georg Kajanus who founded Data he knows about this and I know that he was very touched when he heard about it and thought it was wonderful that we liked Data. It was a couple of years ago…
Robert: How do you mean a couple of years ago? *grins* he heard about us when we did our third record when he was asked if he wanted to produce it…
Richard: Yeah you are right, look at the way time passes…
Robert: The time we are talking about is 1996…
Richard: Yeah it is a couple of years ago…
Robert: Only a couple, a couple of years ago…*grins*

RoD: Oh everything is relative…
Robert: Yeah that is true! *laughs*
Rickard: Yeah well, he was mostly touched because there were still people who listened to Data and if you have not heard of it before - Data it is really good synth pop music!



RoD: Which bands has had the greatest influence on your creative work and style in the beginning or your career and which are now?
Robert: Data, Yazoo.
Richard: Human League, Soft Cell and early Depeche Mode.
Robert: When it comes to singing, I and Johan (Malmgren) have very different style on our song but we manage to make it work anyway. Johan is very much into Elvis as I am sure many people know already. He is not afraid to show it with for example the clothes he wore on stage yesterday when we played at the festival, they were really inspired by Elvis or at least inspired by Texas. Johan has been inspired a lot by the way The Beatles sang. I have gotten very much from David Bowie and Bryan Ferry, I don’t think they are good singers when it comes to tone/pitch especially not Bryan Ferry but when it comes to style and emotionally they are huge. Alison Moyet from Yazoo has also inspired me. I believe we can thank Yazoo for the fact that the synth-pop music got so popular and reached new levels when people understood that it does not have to apathetic and boring.

RoD: What or whom inspires you when you write the lyrics/music?
Robert: That is a question for Richard since I am hardly involved in it; I am more involved with the production.
Richard: Well it is different stuff, everything that is on the new record are stuff that I either has written with Johan or together with Leslie Bayne. Musically it is the old heroes that I have listened to, Britt-pop and indie music from the early 90´s. I fell in love with Suede and Blur in 1993 and that is the music that I like best still. But when I sit down and make music at home it is these old heroes that make it fun to do music, to sit with the synthesizers and by the computer. Lyrically it can be whatever you want; of course band you listen to, their lyrics or books that you read, you catch ways of expressing yourself. I mean the English that you learn in school is pretty static and the English you know today has developed through listening to a lot of English music and reading a lot of English books. This is the way my language has developed and there you find a lot of influences when you are trying to explain a feeling or something…

RoD: You can use English in another way than Swedish; there are so many more words…
Richard: Absolutely! I have tried to write lyrics in Swedish but I find it hard, it becomes so banal somehow. But when I listen to bands like Kent who I really like a lot, I think Jocke Berg (singer and song writer in Swedish band Kent) is an amazing lyric composer, he can write songs in Swedish who are and feels unique. You have to ponder some about what he mean and that is something I really appreciate. I like the English language because you can play with the words and maybe as a Swede I think I (I have gotten comments about this from some of the English speaking fans in USA about our later records, where the fans think that we use the English language in a way that not many English or Americans do) dare to use the words maybe wrong but in the end it works anyway and that is an advantage I see as a non English speaking person.



RoD: You can build the lyrics differently…
Richard: Yeah and I also want to say that for example David Bowie and John Foxx also has inspired me some. John Foxx was in Ultravox and you really have to ponder about what he really mean - his lyrics are pretty unique and that is something I really like. Of course you want a feeling in the lyric but I don’t want it to be too direct, I like when you have to think about it some. I find it interesting when it is some hard, when the lyrics has different meanings and Bowie and Foxx are really good at this.
Robert: I want to mention that I have gotten a lot of inspiration from Kiss, it is something that I have been ashamed of before, oh well I have dared to confess it. Many people has the opinion that Kiss is only make-up and nothing more but the thing is that I begun listening to the band before I knew how they looked like. I got some tapes from a friend in the middle of the 70´s and some of the songs just hit me right in the heart. Now when I have grown up and learned how to analyze music through the years I realize more and more that it is damn good pop music they play - really! They do it in some hard rock way but they have got some damn great voice and they have built the songs in a way that is really just great!
Richard: I too had my first crush with Kiss in the 70´s…
Robert: My other band Hype, we did a gig in Halmstad (Swedish town on the west coast) many years ago and I could not resist doing a cover of a Kiss song. I just had to know if it worked out on synthesizers and it worked out really great!

RoD: Which song did you chose?
Robert: ‘King of the night time world’
Richard: Aha…
Robert: The lyrics made me realize that it is about much more than I thought at first…
Richard: We don’t just get influenced by the synth world these days; it is such a wide spectrum, it’s some of the bands strengths that we have very much different influences but even if we turn it down, we end up in the synth box in a way with melodies and everything.

RoD: What drives you and makes you keep working with music?
Robert: Passion for music.
Richard: Yeah absolutely! I can’t be without it.
Robert: Let me put it like this, at the same time as we are pretty different individuals we complement each other unbelievable good. We have learned how to spend time together and it might sound pretty boring to say but without the music I believe that we would have grown apart from each other.
Richard: Without the music we would not have spend time together.
Robert: No absolutely, from the beginning it was the synthesizers that united us but now we have definitely found each other’s qualities and we know where we are not to step and how to avoid making things wrong.
Richard: Yeah we now know how to work as a band and as friends
Robert: Absolutely.
Richard: We are very different as individuals but in the music there are such a passion, a day won’t pass without me getting melodies and ideas for lyrics in my head but the boring thing is that 9 out of 10 falls away because I don’t have the time.



RoD: What can you tell me about your latest record ‘A Soft Exchange’; what has been the major source of inspiration?
Robert: When I start to think about it I think the largest inspiration - unconsciously is our past or the things that we have done before, we have started to think about it and a lot of it lies in our legacy.
Richard: But also when you think about all these bands who comes back, they have been gone for a couple of years but you get so very disappointed on them cause they return with something you are not used to, something that you don’t want to hear and then it is not what you expected. We felt like “we are damn sure going to make a record that the fans will recognize”! *laughs*
Richard: Robert is right, we have glanced on what we have done earlier and of course we have gone back to the source – our old heroes that is the way we did when we made the record and during those years, the record is from around 2005. I must confess that we have never been further away from that music than we are today. Of course you dig out and listen to your old synth records sometimes and then you realize how really good they were but in the 90´s we lived on a different way with the music.
Robert: I am the only one who still listens to and enjoy all the old synth-pop music. *laughs*
Richard: We have gone back, listened to old records and of course we have borrowed a lot but we are very aware of it and I think that we manage to create something of our own. Then life in general is what inspires you when you write lyrics, you write about things that you experience and feel and it is hard to say where it comes from.

RoD: Which song moves you most?
Robert: ‘With Grace’. It just hit me right on from the first moment.

Here the rain started pouring and we have to run for cover in a bar tent.

RoD: If you think back to the time when you worked on your very first record how has the way you work changed since then from how you work with music today?
Richard: Everyone is much more involved nowadays.
Robert: Yeah definitely, I had of course something to do with the work before as a singer but today I am very involved in the part with creating the production and find the arrangements. We are all a lot more involved in what the others do, we talk more about our ideas with each other, before it was more like into the studio and then we did the production there.
Richard: That is right and on the new album we have done a lot of the production together with Johan Västberg but we have put down much more power with the production and we have worked with it during a pretty long period of time. Some records suffer because you have been under such pressure, you have had 3 weeks in the studio and on these 3 weeks then everything must be finished. Now we have dragged out the work for a couple of years and I think that is one of the reasons to why the record has such a high quality.
Robert: I agree.
Richard: Yeah and also we are more mature, on the first record we had made some demo songs, a guy came and asked us if we wanted to do a record and of course we wanted to do that and then we just were into the studio. I had never been in a studio before, we did not know anything and of course the technology is on another way these days and of course we have gotten better.

RoD: If you were hit by a car and lie dying on the ground - but you got to sing one song that people would remember you for, a song that would sum up you which song would that be?
Robert: ‘Space Oddity’ by David Bowie. I don’t know if that would sum up me but it is one of the songs that I admire most, the lyrics has so many dimensions, space of course but I think that it also is very much about living on earth.
Richard: ‘Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth’ by Sparks, that song is so very good!

RoD: Do you have any message to your fans?
Richard: Yes, we are working on new material and we do everything we can to work faster this time.
Robert: Thanks for your patience.
Richard: Yeah definitely!
Robert: We are not that fast, we take a long time with creating something but hopefully that will improve now when we finally has gotten some routines again but thanks for the patience!

Thanks to Robert Enforsen and Richard Jomshof for taking the time to do this interview. For more information about ELEGANT MACHINERY please visit http://www.elegantmachinery.se/

All live pictures by Helena Torstensson, interview picture by Fredrik Sundström
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