Interview With Chi From Spider Kitten

Spider Kitten are a hard band to describe,are they doom,stoner,grunge ? Actually i think they are all of these but i will let you make up your own mind.What they are though is a very unique sounding band with a very original approach compared to a lot of other doom acts around at the moment.A hard working band that loves playing live,they are seeking as many gigs as possible in the coming year.If you live in their part of world,get out and support the band.For everyone else,check out the tracks on their Myspace page.I am sure you will dig the heavy doom stoner rock vibes they dish out.Enjoy this interview i did with Chi...... 1. I will start off by saying Spider Kitten are a bit of a undiscovered gem of a band but you have been around a while.Give us a history lesson on the band ? Spider Kitten formed in 2001, I was in a grunge band called Mombomb and I wanted to do something that was a little more experimental. So I started playing around with feedback and tones.& I was really into Earth at the time, I had the Phase 3 album on all the time. Anyway I recruited a friend of mine, ptew, who is a programmer and we started making soundscapes.& We had this idea to repel, to literally clear every venue we played.& we played the most obnoxious noise to confused emo kids and this was fun for a few years. Then we decided we wanted to write some songs, mostly to see what Spider Kitten would sound like applied to a more conventional musical format. This we did, and after a few shows we found we need more members.There was this drone band I knew of called Rocket Girl, a two piece, they listed us in their influences, so I asked if they wanted to help out. The guitarist, Twan, joined straight away, but the bass player, Nid, was on tour with the No Fit State Circus, playing bass in the house band. He returned the day before our first gig as a quartet. One practice then a gig. We played as a quartet for a while, then Twan left to move to Bristol. Undaunted we wrote a new EP (Rats From A Sinking Ship, which will be released this year) and carried on as a trio. That’s where we are now, a little worse for wear, but otherwise intact. 2.How would you describe the sound of the band ? Our sound varies from record to record, we retain our basic elements, but there is a different feel to everything we do. You could throw around terms like: Doom, Sludge, Industrial, Grunge and you’d be close. At the moment I’d say we’re a Punk Rock band experimenting with instrumentation and tempo. 3.Listening to the tracks on your site i can hear some influences but what are you most influenced by ? Our mental health. All 3 of us suffer from some form of sociaphobia.We’ve created our band to help insulate us from the outside world. We all live together in a big house in the suburbs, with a studio instead of a living room. We rarely leave it’s confines except for playing shows and buying our “essentials”.Musically we all have different tastes but here’s a list of people we like:Melvins, Godflesh, Thrones, Earth, Electric Wizard, Aphex Twin, Venetian Snares, Pink Floyd, Morphine, Black Flag, St Vitus, Alice In Chains, CCR, Burzum, Royal Trux, Darkthrone, King Crimson, Evol Intent, Peter Gabriel, Tad, and loads of other stuff. 3. It says on your site you use a drum machine rather than a real drummer,what is the main reasons behind this ? To begin with we had no drums, I played guitar and ptew used a PC synth. Then as we began to write songs that required drums, it just seemed logical to carry on using the computer.We’re big fans of Thrones, Godflesh and Earth so there was precedent in using drum machines for heavy music. Also drummers are a nightmare, they’re often your best friend, but if any member of your band is going to be late or not show up, in my experience, it’s your drummer. We are actually working on something with a friend of ours who drums for Drop Dead Darlin’(wicked punk band) and we might even do some shows with him, but I think we’ll always come back to the drum machine, be it a TR-505 or ptew’s custom software drums. 5.You are looking for live shows,how has that been going ? I’ll be honest, it’s hard. We’re too weird for the straight doom promoters and too heavy for the experimental promoters. We play a lot in South Wales and in nearby English cities and we’re heading up north for our first show in Manchester at a Metal Festival in May. 6.Tell us about your releases and how they differ from each other ? You can hear all of them at http://www.spiderkitten.bandcamp.com" highlights="" include:=""> Live At E10 (2003) - improvised classical drone Things I Can’t Kill (2005) weird mess of industrial, stoner and punk Dead Beat EP (2007) crust punk Ineffable (2007) grungy doom Future Echos (2008) crust stoner doom punk concept album Rats From A Sinking Ship (2009) unreleased as yet, it’s heavy and it’s got cello on it. 7.There seems to be a hell of a lot of Doom bands in the UK and Scotland these days or is it these bands are just now being recognized ? I think there have always been a lot. There’s definitely more now, some good some bad. In South Wales there are a curiously large number of bands that have doom roots, but do something different with it (and I don’t mean bad hardcore band decides to play slow). 8.What inspires the songs,lyrically ? All sorts of things. Depression, Drugs, Politics, Love, Hate, Fear.I’m not a particularly happy or calm person, and I think the lyrics reflect this. Future Echos is a concept album, so I’m writing in character, but there’s bits of me in there. I’d say a consistent theme between all the songs is fear or a desire to escape it. 9.On your bandcamp site you offer a lot of free downloads.Will you be giving away more music for free in the future ? We’re talking with some labels at the moment, and to be honest it’s making me want to give everything we do away for free forever. We try and give away as much as possible. I think what we’ll end up doing is allowing the music to be downloaded in high quality for free and encouraging people to copy and distribute it, but press short runs of each release on CD or vinyl and charge for those. I have no desire to make money, it’s far more important people hear our music. 10.What are the venues like where you have played and have you got a favorite venue that you play ?Mostly pretty cool. If the sound guy is nice and there’s monitoring, we’re happy. 11.Have you had much airplay on any radio stations and what about magazine articles ? We’ve been played on the BBC a few times, and we keep cropping up on internet radio stations in Russia and Greece. We’ve shyed away from too much of that kind of publicity until now. We weren’t really comfortable being scrutinized by journalists, but now we find we actually quite enjoy it, in a perverse way. 12.Do you see the band doing any big tours in the future ? Yes. First we’ll take Manhattan, then we’ll take Berlin. 13.From a UK point of view,how do you see the USA Doom scene ? Thriving. It’s because you have all those cheap vintage valve amps out there… 14.The Future Echo's Album - how long did you work on that ? Future Echos took around 9 days to write and record (that’s actually a very long time for us), a week to mix, and a day to master. We tend to write things as we’re going along, there’ll be an overall idea of what stuff should sound like, but nothing in stone, so if an idea jumps out at you, you can go with it. We’ve recorded albums over a weekend before now. 15.Finally how many shows would the band like to do this year and what is the long term ambitions for the band ? We’d like to be playing 250 - 300 shows a year, if we could book that many. Long term ambition is to still exist and make great music. There’ll be an album a year for at least the next 10 years. http:www.myspace.com/spiderkitten