Q&A with Melina Eva and Thomas Sciarone of GOLD
A few months ago during the height of the corona lockdown, Milena and Thomas of GOLD asked me to do a Q&A about their breakthrough album No Image. This article was published exclusively in their self-published zine, No Zine, which you can order a copy of here. With their permission, I was allowed to finally publish this cool conversation on my own blog space. Enjoy!
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Jasper: GOLD has been around since 2012. That’s a long time ago.
Thomas: It is. It’s funny, I think it is the band I’ve been in the longest. But it still feels very new to me. That’s kind of weird, but I think that’s a good thing. There are still so many doors left to open.
Milena: It doesn’t feel that long. But it’s also a band with which we’ve toured a lot, and we’ve already made many albums.
Thomas: Yeah, and it also has to do with the two phases GOLD went through. The first phase happened between 2012 and 2014…
Milena: The phase we should have erased!
(both Thomas and Milena laugh out loud)
Thomas: But that was also a necessary phase, for our development and our soul-searching process. When No Image came out in 2015, it became a new start. I think that might be the reason it still feels very new to us. Though for many bands five years can feel like a lifetime.
Milena: But we didn’t release a whole lot of songs. If you knew how fast we write our albums, we didn’t release a lot of songs over the past few years. If we didn’t have jobs, we could have written five more records.
As you alluded to just now, GOLD made a huge sonic leap from Interbellum (2012) and No Image (2015). Thomas, were you still playing in The Devil’s Blood when you started GOLD?
Thomas: No, GOLD pretty much started the day I left The Devil’s Blood. I immediately wanted to start something new.
Maybe that’s why the Devil’s Blood is still tangible on Interbellum… the retro-vibe of those songs is still audible because I wasn’t fully detached from Devil’s Blood yet.
Milena: I can definitely hear you overcompensating on Interbellum. You wanted to be a virtuoso on guitar, which probably you aren’t. For me it was the same, I wanted to show everybody I could sing, that I had this range. In hindsight, I think we were trying to impress everybody. The Devil’s Blood was such an important band for us, our scene and our friends. It was the center of everything, so it was hard to step aside and do something different.
Thomas: What I didn’t know back then, but what I realised later, is that Interbellum was an exercise in songwriting. There are some good catchy songs on there with a head and a tail, they are dynamic. That probably was what I was doing at the time: writing songs without really showing myself through the music I was making. The same goes for Milena. The record lacks our own personality. In the process between Interbellum and No Image, that’s what we learned to discover. The process around No Image was about rediscovering ourselves.
Milena: We were totally fed up with the heavy metal inspired image, taking pictures at graveyards. The whole image behind the music was something we were never really interested in. But somehow we were still connected with that on Interbellum, and not anymore on No Image. On Interbellum, our influence ranged more towards Fleetwood Mac, Heart…
Interbellum has some bluesiness in it…
Thomas: And I hate blues!
Milena: No Image drew from things like Portishead, stuff we listened to before we started GOLD.
Thomas: Interbellum was — and I’m struggling to describe it — maybe like an absence of the mind. What I did musically before The Devil’s Blood and after Interbellum was so much more progressive and original. And Interbellum just lacked that.
It’s funny though, because even the word ‘Interbellum’ suggests a transience between two phases. And it has a picture of a peacock — a bird that symbolises flaunting — flying on the cover, which of course looks totally awkward. So it does honestly signify that whole notion of finding your footing as a band in this super clumsy way. The artwork acknowledges as much, and I like how GOLD still summoned the right imagery to describe what kind of zone the band was in during Interbellum. Or as we later found out with No Image, a lack of imagery…
Thomas: True, and we also don’t play music from Interbellum anymore, because it simply doesn’t fit between the records we’ve made after that. But it’s not something we are shy or ashamed about. It was a necessary process to go through. We developed into something different, and I’m glad our creativity didn’t stagnate there.
Yeah, some bands, well, maybe most bands even, never quite shake out of that.
Milena: When you become super successful with a record like that, that may be a good reason to not progress, but for us it wasn’t like that, fortunately. The crazy thing is, when we were writing Interbellum, we were already thinking we were making a No Image-kind of album. We thought we were doing something completely different, but obviously, that was entirely in our heads. Because it was pretty obvious what we were doing. We had a band picture with me at the front, like a very obvious ‘female-fronted band’. An image you needed to have to get noticed or become popular. I’m kind of a pleaser, and that was definitely what I was doing on that album. I was doing what other people might have expected me to do.
Thomas: I grew up listening to black metal and death metal, but also punk and hardcore, noise and hip hop. That whole range of music that I love never found its way into Interbellum.
Milena: It’s the same with me: I love R&B and dance music as well, and you don’t hear any of that back on the album.
As a reaction to embellishments of Interbellum, I really dig the sort of anti-art of No Image. It’s just a black cover and a silly logo.
Milena: We were so ‘fuck you’ back then. It didn’t really get us in trouble, but it didn’t help us either. I remember sending the artwork to our label, and they were like ‘are you serious!?’. Sven, the owner of Ván Records, always told us to do whatever we wanted. We had a really privileged situation. But he definitely warned us: ‘This is just a black square, you do realise that, right? In a magazine this will NEVER work.’ We didn’t even come up with decent press shots…
Or a name that was easy to Google.
Thomas: Sven told us that this wouldn’t help us stand out in bins at a record store… the band name wasn’t even on the cover.
I found that rad though. I mean, I already told you once before about how I discovered GOLD. First I couldn’t find the band online because the name was too common, and there still wasn’t a lot of press. I just thought of myself: ‘Who in their right mind would call themselves GOLD, instead of something more pronounced like ‘Gargoyle Tongue’ or ‘Ghoul Dick’? I was like: what’s the point? Then I watched the video for ‘Servant’, which was this assault on the psyche, a reel of these horrible images juxtaposed with these vibrant emojis. It was a slap of reality to the face. Some bands would maybe add some sort of redeeming element to soften the impact a bit. But it just wasn’t there. But I also thought it was sort of brave that this band was unapologetic about making you feel this nauseating discomfort. So I tried to think it through and looked at my own position of privilege, which stood at the root of that discomfort. It forced me to reflect on my part of the world, and the crazy thing is, this is something we witness every day when we scroll through social media feeds. But ‘Servant’ was merely like a pure, concentrated dosage of it.
Milena: Before we worked out the title and the overall concept behind No Image the idea of smileys was already in place. After the album came out, you could buy t-shirts and sweaters and everything with smileys, in high fashion and everything.
Of course Nirvana used that iconography as well…
Milena: Sure, huge bands already explored it. But Thomas and I were talking about the term post-urbanism, which was a term we more or less coined. We were anti-capitalist. But at the same time, we are capitalists, and probably have been for a big part of our lives. We live in a capitalist society so it’s not something we can fix on our own. We try to not be capitalist but it’s a system that’s hard to just go around. And I feel like we were talking about all those things a lot before we made that artwork. On top of that, we were very focused on the post-urbanism thing, because Rotterdam inspired us; the darkness of the city, the roughness of the city, the shitty neighborhoods…
Thomas: I even wrote a whole manifesto on post-urbanism that was never published, and deliberately so as a way to further flesh out the concept. What we meant by post-urbanism, what later translated into No Image, was the idea of a city that’s not segregated anymore. Rotterdam used to be, and still kind of is a segregated city. Of course you have people from different backgrounds living together in their areas or whatever. But even when you are gay you visit a gay bar, or when you’re a metalhead you head out to a venue programming metal music. There’s all this segregation along cultural lines, and post-urbanism was a vision of integrating it all into one city where everybody lives happily together.
But that’s also the sound of No Image: there are no electronics on the album or hip-hop beats, but the artists that inspired us the most at the time were artists like The Knife and Kanye West. Within the framework of guitar-based music, there are all these different angles and sounds coming together, creating a new hybrid.
Milena: The idea of anticapitalism is sometimes hidden in the lyrics. In an earlier version of the song ‘Taste Me’ the lyrics were completely made of advertising slogans. ‘Have it your way’ ‘I’m loving it’ ‘Design your own life’ ‘Happy inside’ ‘Home is the most important place in the world’. All those shitty lines that get thrown at you. The only thing we kept in the chorus — and I don’t think anyone understands its true meaning — was four or five lines nabbed from cigarette commercials from the fifties. It was literally borrowed…
Thomas: …stolen.
Milena: So there are always these hidden easter eggs in the lyrics, same with ‘Old Habits’, which addresses the notion of being part of a system as a survival mechanism, do that over and over and over again, with nothing really changing. All of that was already in the songs. Us making the artwork and those videos for No Image were a small step.
Thomas: For the ‘Servant’ video, we had no means to work with. There was no budget for GOLD to make a video from scratch.
Milena: We made some videos for Interbellum. We thought people might see us and then be compelled to listen to our records. But for No Image, the videos were a way for us to make a statement.
I remember Annika Henderson (Anika, Exploded View) telling me once,’ The idea itself is more important than the execution or the result’.
Thomas: Yes, and the videos added a whole new layer and dimension to GOLD’s music. No matter how political we are as individuals, the songs on No Image themselves are not all that political.
Milena: Because they are our songs, they are political. But we’re not that punk! (laughs)
Thomas: The political is more intrinsic in the overall vision, instead of firing out these activist slogans.
Punk rock weaponises the language of the oppressors and uses it against them. But the funny thing about ‘Taste Me’, as you mentioned Milena, is that it can also be listened to as a personal song, because everything is so dense-layered and obscured.
Thomas: But that’s the thing; ‘Taste Me’ is also just a love song!
Milena: It’s a mix of things, that pretty much happens in all our songs. It’s just about real life. Most of the lyrics I wrote for No Image start off as fragmented sentences, and like a puzzle, or…
Thomas: Or a collage…
Milena: Which is what GOLD did with everything on No Image.
But to go back to the video for ‘Servant’ (which has been removed from the internet), I have to once again stress on how harrowing it is to watch. It openly courts the worst in all of us. It reminded me of those horrible images of the Vietnam War, juxtaposed with Wagner like in Apocalypse Now.
Milena: Yeah, but in this super over-the-top way. The way we consume that stuff on Instagram and Facebook. We get shown so much shit every single day. Without asking for it. I remember all these ISIS lynchings, stuff you could just watch on YouTube! The animals you could see get slaughtered, and everyone has that friend on Facebook that shows those images explicitly. You’re scrolling through the shittiest things in life.
Thomas: My idea for the video was inspired by all these fail-compilations, which was this YouTube hype where people would post 10-minute reels of bloopers and people failing. And this is like humanity failing. A lot of people interpreted it as a misanthropic video. But that’s not the intent; it was just a mirror. And there are two layers in this mirror. One is the emoji’s in the foreground, the other is the shit that people are capable of…
Milena: … and you get to choose what you watch. So there are those who can’t watch it because it compresses with some of the heaviest shit ever. But there are also people that don’t really see it. They know there is shitty stuff happening, but they can’t remember anything, because they focus on the emojis. It’s the same behaviour we display on the internet.
Thomas: It’s sensory overload, because the impact never really hits that hard, because once one image passes by you already have to process the next one.
But face it, it would have been a failure if the video didn’t unnerve people the way it did. That’s the whole point of making a statement.
Milena: Just imagine Thomas making this video, having to watch all that shit for days and days. And googling ‘person dies horribly somewhere’ and things like that. Then rummaging through thousands of videos and having to choose one for the video. You were brainwashed, actually!
Thomas: As shitty as it was to watch for you, it was ten times shittier for me to make. (laughs)
Well, it certainly put people on notice.
Thomas: It was never meant to be a bold statement about our band. I think it was just something we felt was missing in music at that time. And definitely in rock music.
True. A lot of rock and indie music was allegorical, or a form of escapism and/or hedonism. Plus, in 2015, there wasn’t a wave of post-Trump protest music yet.
Thomas: That’s spot on; you either had the hedonism or the whole fairytale take ‘death-and-darkness’. Those were two fake worlds that rock and metal presented. That’s regarded as heavy… but there is nothing more heavy than what’s happening right now in the real world.
Milena: After we released No Image we couldn’t really quit that direction either. It’s interesting now, because everyone is an activist these days. Five years ago you had Charlie Hebdo, ISIS, all these dramatic things… and everyone thought the world was on fire at the time. Meanwhile, everybody was watching cat videos. At least in my bubble, people are now noticing the world is on fire, and they are going completely crazy or getting depressed. Because if you process it all, it’s a lot.
Thomas: I think the main difference between now and five years ago was that these events were often displayed as isolated sensationalised events. Just like 9/11 nineteen years ago, they were being covered like events. Now people see that these happenings are symptoms of decades of globalisation, capitalism, materialism, inequalities, all those things.
Milena: And it will continue to get worse probably.
Thomas: We wanted to show that, sure, you look at something like ISIS. But also look at the way we treat animals!
Milena: People were looking at all this global turmoil as something new and exotic. Back then people were looking at Syria as something that happened far away, like “We don’t do that?! That’s a whole different part of the world”. Now people are starting to realise that things are bad everywhere.
Thomas: Another example are the recent disasters in Bangladesh with all the clothing factories. No Image was a statement against that kind of apathy, using these emojis as a means. Now the apathy is gone, which is a good thing. But now everyone is kind of an activist, but each in their own area.
Milena: But it’s very hollow; when you go to a demonstration, you have to show it on Instagram, otherwise people would never know. So again, it’s also about image, and with so many people engaging in it. People feel compelled to do the same, because otherwise you’re the asshole who doesn’t participate in it.
Thomas: There’s a lot of holier-than-thou activism going around. I like it when people challenge me, holding up a mirror to help me become a better version of myself. But it’s also a matter of picking your battles. You see a lot of activists pointing the finger at each other, telling each other they are more woke. But the real battle is against capitalism. It’s not among activists, or vegans or anti-racists. It’s us against this fucked up system that all of us are suffering under. You can’t fix racism or sexism if you don’t fix capitalism. And by fixing it, I mean abolishing it.
