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Interview with:

Pieter Winkelaar
Line up

Paul Broekhuizen - Vocals
Edwin Hofman - Guitars
Stefan de jong- Synthesizers
Pieter WInkelaar - Bass
Edwin Westerink – Drums


Website
 
ww.fertilereality.tk


Interview

Why did you choose the name: Fertile Reality, what does this name mean to you?

The name is made up by our singer and former keyboarder Eline. It's a parody on "Virtual reality". With this name we want to say that technological improvement is important, but that we shouldn't forget our place in nature.

After ten years and three LPs, could you strike the balance, the pros and the cons of your adventure in the music business?

Not really. We are releasing the material ourselves, and we still see ourselves as a developing band. We don't see cons really. But there are enough pro's; playing live, people that love our music, composing new song. We are a happy band!
 
For a few years, things turn out to speed up, either on studio or live, how would you explain this? Is this luck or a reward of your efforts?

Both, I guess. We've been doing our thing for more than ten years now. When we started we were ridiculed a lot, because we played New Wave and Cold Wave, but those kind of styles surfaced again in the last years, so things started to look up for us. Furthermore it is just hard work, and getting to know the right people.

How do you see your place in the Dutch metal landscape?

We don't, because we aren't a metal band. We have some befriended metal bands like Carthago or Last breath denied, but apart from checking out some bands when we play at a festival, we don't look into Dutch Metal that much. A few of our members hang out with other Dutch wave, industrial and goth bands. Within that scene we are quite accepted, but we aren't really concerned with our place in a scene. It's just about the music and hanging out with friends.

You have decided to let your last cd: ‘The Dune of the Mill’, be a free download, why did you do this?

We want people to hear and enjoy the music. And a bit of laziness, because the initial 100 copies we made were sold out in a few weeks. The interest in this album was quite big, so putting it up for download was the logical step, so that we could distribute it easy and fast to people who enjoy our music. It is still being heavily downloaded at this moment, though the album is already two years old. If people have kept it on their hard disks, or burned it to cd-r, there should be around 1000 copies out there right now I guess. Especially people from France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and the USA seem to like it and the Netherlands off course.

Getting back to this last album, the Cold Wave influence is very important, either on vocal or keyboard parts are you truly influenced by this kind of music, or is it just coming from a mix between the different tastes of band members?

Yes we are. We are all big fans of Joy Division and Wire, though we have more influences. We also like postpunk a lot, and we feel we have a big influence in shoegazer and indie as well. We all have our different tastes ranging from EBM to hip-hop and from classical to techno and even ska, but cold wave, new wave and postpunk is the influence we all have in common.

The production and the mix of this new born album sounds pretty good, a lot of artists acknowledge this step to be one of the more difficult, or just the easiest to fail. How did you manage it?

We still feel things could be done better, but we are very happy people like the sound. We produce our albums ourselves, and it is just that we learn a lot from previous sessions. We also like to keep it simple. For the Dune of the mill we used a 8 track HD recorder, and the album is recorded live without overdubs. Only the vocal part was recorded later. So if you listen to "The dune of the mill" you hear a live playing band.

You already reach up to the successor of The Dune Of The Mill, could you discuss more about your working methods, did you compose democratically, with jam sessions, or did a member came out with a new rhythmic or melodic pattern and the others accept it?

Most of the time someone writes some tunes at home, and we work that out in the rehearsal room. Edwin, our guitar player writes most of the tracks, and he always brings in the complete guitar part, on which we add the other instruments. After that we experiment a lot with sounds and arrangements, to get the most out of our songs. I write sometimes a song that way, and Stefan, our keyboard player has recently brought in a nice sounding tune. But it also happens that we get ideas from jam sessions.
Right now we are working on tracks of our upcoming album. We have about 8 new tunes now, and there are two more coming up. Expect no big style changes here, though the new songs might be a little bit faster and somewhat rawer. We practice the new songs a lot, and we are planning recording sessions this summer or autumn. If all goes well people can expect it late 2005. We are also looking into finding a label to release our music, but with the current market, that has become quite a challenge.

 As we discuss first, things speed up on live dimension, do you have a dream of playing with any big bands on a world tour? Who would this be and why?

We already played with the Mission and that was big fun. We would love to play with Interpol, which is a band we all like a lot. Furthermore Clan of Xymox would be fun, maybe the Cure or perhaps My Bloody Valentine if they reform. We would find it especially an honour if we could open for Wire. Furthermore playing the WGT in Leipzig is a dream for some of us. And though not really a big band, we played with The Cold from Germany two times, and they are great guys and a great band. We definitely want to play more with them!

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