by Catrin Nordwig | November 2016 |
– Please, first of all, introduce yourself a bit since you’re somewhat of a newcomer, even though you’re active for some years now. When and why did you start making music? And what’s the relationship to your “sibling band” Cardinal Noire exactly? Why did you opt for two bands (of more or less the same style)
I’m Kalle Lindberg, the mucisian responsible for Protectorate. I’m also a member of Cardinal Noire, in which I’m mainly a vocalist, but I also do a bit of music and production in it too. I’ve been doing music since I was like 16, initially I was in a metal band, but in the early 2000’s I began to take interest more and more in electronic music.
– What is the album about contentwise?
Lyrically is largely about
– There has been this uplift/renaissance of US-style Industrial music/ oldschool EBM in the last two years (thinking of acts such as 3Teeth, Youth Code, Dead When I Found Her…). What do you think, why is this style so popular again?
– And, what do you think, did this trend favour Protectorate signing a record deal just now and Protectorate (and also Cardinal Noire) gaining more and more attention?
Probably yes, since you put it like that.
Protectorate was actually signed in 2013, I don’t know if that counts as “just now” of not though 😛 The reason the record got out this late after I was signed, is that we did a single Cardinal Noire song and a music video, just for fun mostly at time and got signed immediately. I was strugling a bit with writing material for Protectorate and Lasse didn’t seem to have that problem with CN, so we both pretty quickly decided to concentrate on the CN release first and then I’d continue writing for Protectorate. I did have almost an albums worth of stuff at that point, but ended up scrapping most of the material. This was because making the CN album taught me lots of things and I really didn’t want the too bands sounding identical, so I had to figure out a new perspective for Protectorate
– The sound of Protectorate is a mixture of typical US-American and Canadian Industrial elements from the late eighties and early nineties – it sounds originally oldschool, yet modern in regards to the production. And also with Cardinal Noire you managed to create this unique“Too Dark Park”-Puppy-sound – and creating the sound of these idols is a trick not many bands manage to perform that perfectly as you do. So: What’s your trick, how do you do that?
To me it’s just about good songs and the esthetics that I personally like, I don’t really think about what style a given element represents or even thrive that consciously to a predetermined end result. Just kinda go with the flow of an initial idea, to see where it takes me. I think the same pretty much goes for Lasse when he writes Cardinal Noire stuff. We never like wanted to imitate specifically TDP or necessarily even Skinny Puppy on the CN record. We’re both, obviously, big fans of SP and have listened to the stuff heavily, so when we were writing CN , I think we were more like “this sounds awesome” than “awesome, this sounds like Skinny Puppy”. That’s not to say that we consciously steered away from any SP influence, ‘cos why would someone do that, we both think it’s about the best band around and thus largely the reason for doing this kind of music for us. And guess this goes for Protectorate too, ‘cos for me it’s not “US / Canadian” industrial but just industrial. My take on the subject, isn’t that why artists make records.
– In this context: what are your musical idols and influences?
This is going to be an embarrasingly cliched list, but obviously Skinny Puppy, Ministry, DAF, Front 242, the Cabs… I mean most of the reveared classics. I also like Devo quite a bit and the good 80’s synth pop songs.
– What else is coming up in the next months? Maybe some gigs over here in Germany?
There is Cardinal Noire vinyl release coming in a couple of months and a Skinny Puppy tribute album coming out too, to which we were requested to appear on. As for shows in Germany, we’d absolutely love to do some. We don’t have anything booked, so dear promoters reading, please contact us, maybe we can work something out.