9+1 Q&A with Orbital Gloom

What inspired you to first start making music? And how did you come to be in your current incarnation? Or if you prefer, a brief bio about you.

Kosmo: Can lives in the world of musical theatre, video art and cultural conception and I smash beats in the streets, in the clubs and I’ve had several music projects in Berlin. At a point in our lives we met and fused into Orbital Gloom – a living machine, acting between all the dirt and beauty of electronic urban madnesses. We love to create spacey visions and clear creative conceptions, visual creations, a story in every track and a voice that humanizes the gloom.

Provide us with some info about your latest release…

Can: We could say that the song “Floating Lies“ is about the human condition and this huge question: “are you and your life true to yourself?“ I think that truths and lies are companions of our whole lives, and it’s hard to find out if the truth is a lie or if the lie is the truth. It sounds a bit confused, but we have to find our individual ways. For me, the right way is to reflect, find answers and to search for the things you wish to be able to do. And of course, sometimes it’s hard to deal with this.

Which ones would you consider your main influences both music-wise & non-music-wise?

Kosmo: Difficult to say, we both have this emotional connection to crazy synthesizer sounds and these are the fundaments of our creative processes.

Can: I have the honor of Kosmo feeding me a lot of new sound ideas and he has the openness that I can pick something up and turn it into words and build a story behind it. And this method puts me into a new lyrical world.

In what way does your sound differ from the rest genre-related artists/bands and why should we listen to your music? In other words, how would you describe your sound?

Kosmo: Our process is always unique. In every track we use one or two sounds, but mostly a whole sound kit stacked with samples made from field recordings. Things out there beaten mostly by hand or just driven by there natural source, transformed to percussive sounds and fulfilling roles or functions for hihat, kick, snare etc. enhanced with the sound of my analog machines or samples of classical or unconventional drum machines of all decades. In the case of “Floating Lies” the claps have a layer of hand claps, I made years before at a very silent lake in Sweden reverbed by the surrounding forest. And the clave sound is the sound, of stones dropping though the surface of the same lake. Also the woody beat in the background is a wild mixture of playground corpuses, the dock of the same lake, and some microphone noises of the field recorder itself….. so the story of our sound is very personal and geographical, and that’s in the end what differs from the rest of the music out there from our perspective. Over this we mostly design our sounds from scratch and use a minimum of preset sounds and no loops of sampling libraries for now. In question of structure, we follow our intuition, what mostly leads to unconventional song structures without loosing the feeling for making catchy music. For the back end result of the whole productions it’s up to the listeners to say, if there is an individuality in sound.

Can: …and we have this passion for arts, videos and graphic design, and we try to create art which is a combination of all these things.

Please name your 3 desert islands albums, movies & books…

Can:
– Moderat (2019)
– Paradies-Trilogie by Ulrich Seidl
– Melancholy by Jon Fosse

Do you prefer studio or performing live and why?

Kosmo: We write live, and we are definitely a live act. We meet to play together and we are ready to play onstage, in booths or any other locations. But we benefit a lot from the process of the studio production. We enjoy going from our live versions of tracks to studio productions, which opens many doors for focussing our tracks.

Is there any funny-unique story you would like to share with us, always in relation to your music ‘career’?

Can: Yes, there is 🙂 We had booked a big stage for recording a live video and we tried to open the studio door, but it didn’t work. We tried to open it for about 45 minutes, pushing it inwards with all our power. But then we saw people coming out the rehearsal room next to us and they opened the door outwards instead of inwards. We looked at each other silently and couldn’t believe what was going on. 🙂

Which track of your own would you point out as the most unique and why?

Kosmo: Universal. Never heard anything like this. Especially the alien voice and the robotic voice over this at that really low tempo, but still techno-ish.

Would you like to share with our readers your future plans?

Kosmo: We want to play live. Since we started our project in 2019 we are still waiting for our live debut and, of course, we are working on new stuff.

Can: In April we will release the official video for “Floating Lies” and we are working on a new track which is called “6 Hours“. Stay tuned.

Free question!!! (Ask yourself a question) you wish to answer and haven’t been given the opportunity…

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Curated by: Christos Doukakis

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