Victor Love Interview – Technomancy is a grimoire of spellware to break the firewall of conformity cast through the digital media.
What’s new in the world of Victor Love?
Victor: The world of the new album is a world where advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It’s a world not so far from now. In fact Cyberpunk is Now, not 80’s pop anymore. The world I am describing in my new album is a bit further in the future. Let’s just say 20 minutes more i the future from now. It’s a world were Big data, heavy surveillance and metadata analysis is influencing lives of everyone. A world were VR has become normality and everything is possible through Technology. This is the vision of the future that influence the music and visuals. On the other side the lyrics are a story of a guy, living in this world, facing the same issues of nowadays. The same problems that doesn’t change or get fixed in society no matter how far we go with technology. This is the world of Technomancy.
– Where did the ideas come from for the album Technomacy?
Victor: It is really hard to say because actually the whole thing has been influenced by many different events that happened to me exactly during the whole year 2015. It would be really complicated now to mention what has influenced the lyrics rather than the music or visual but it’s all stuff that happened to me personally, good or bad, that strongly influenced this album. It’s been an exciting year for me as well as one of the worst and difficult years for me. But in the end I tried to channel all these emotions into the album in a sort of katarsis of all those positive and negative feelings.
– How do you build a song up from nothing to become something?
Victor: Just like usual but this time I used a very minimal setup. Same DAW and stuff but just used really few synth and drum sounds. I tried to keep it essential also to leave space on some songs to let other artists add some synths. Most of the feats are vocal feats even tho there are few songs where artists contributed with additional synths or acoustic instruments. I can say it took 10 times more to get the feats ready rather than the whole album itself. For the gross part of the album I took something like couple of weeks. But then after that I worked more on lyrics and final versions of everything. So roughly it took something like a couple of months of work. But then when the whole album was ready I started to contact really A LOT of other artists to look for collabs and that was some kind of black hole that took something like 9 months to get it done. But I expected that since It’s normal that every artist have it’s own needs and timetable and other stuff to do. But in the end I was really satisfied by the result and everyone contributed in a very positive way. So that’s all what really matters.
– Do you have any tours coming up in the near future?
Victor: I really would like to. Actually one of the reasons that pushed me to do this project was also to have something I could bring live in an easier way and with more punk attitude. Unfortunately with my other project Dope Stars Inc. it’s never so easy to book tours because we are 5 people and we live in all different cities. That makes it harder to arrange a tour sometimes. Instead for this project I plan to have a maximum of 3 people, including me, on stage. I’ll be performing vocals, guitars and synths then there will be a drummer and 3rd element will be a Virtual Reality designer that is gonna design stuff in real time on stage. You’d need a 30$ cardboard tho to see it. After the album is out I will start to look around but I think most probably I will be ready to tour only next autumn, at least for few shows in Europe first.
– Are you a fan of Spotify and similar streaming services? What are your thoughts on this?
Victor: Well, well, well. I think that if I start talking about this it’s never gonna end. So I will just cut it short and say that I believe The Pirate Bay and Napster should seriously consider to sue Spotify for stealing their idea and model. Spotify is even worse than The Pirate Bay since they pay dimes to small bands in order to rip them off and create a sustainable “pension” system for bigger bands. Besides their logs are totally shady and they refuse to give you the data. So in the end nobody really knows what’s happening. Would you ever give your t-shirts to be sold to somebody that can press unlimited copies without any chance to know how many have been really pressed? Just think about it. Besides piracy is action and is usually made bay audiophiles or geeks that are the same ones who are buying stuff or coming to your show. Spotify is instead legalized piracy for the average user that believes he is supporting you but for real he is not. It’s just a very hypocritical thing. I said that years and years ago but looks like the classy dudes of music business just realized now. Those same people who blamed piracy at the time are now all on soundcloud, bandcamp, Spotify etc giving their music for free, like if everything is normal. But when I said that 5 years ago they all attacked me like if it was some heresy. It’s good to see that they have to realize now that they had absolutely no clue. Thing is, they still have no clue. Now some of them are removing their stuff from Spotify…Hello? Done that too. It’s totally useless. You will never convince people to switch to another platform. You will just lose exposure. And I can say that not basing on bla bla bla but because I have removed my stuff for 6 months to test this on myself with Dope Stars Inc. All those guys have really no fucking clue. They talk reading articles here and there. They have no clue about math and they didn’t even test anything. They just talk to be cool on Facebook and change idea every minute. I also changed ideas in my life yes, but for a reason, not just because I’ve been told to do so by the latest hipster that seen internet for the first time on a fucking iPhone. You know people think I promote free music so this means I never bought cds and stuff. Fact is if i check how many cds i bought, movies I’ve seen, concerts i went or video games i bought i totally pwn all of them and their friends piled together. Those hipster talk but they just feel cool cause now FREE is the new BLVK. WRONG. So damn wrong. To give your stuff for free doesn’t’ mean that you are telling your fans you should NEVER pay for it. This is something I told many times. Even when we released our album on The Pirate Bay on 30 may 2011, first time in history, we never said we wanted them NEVER to buy oru stuff. What I specifically said is we were fine with that and willing to provide the torrent legally. Sound good like an answer?
– What would we be surprised to find in your music collection at home?
Victor: I have all sort of stuff. I listen to so many different kind of music you’d never imagine. Only music I can’t stand is probably reggae. But apart from that I am a guy that been a metalhead, a punk, a goth, a rocker, a nu-metal hip hop something, crossover-head whatever. And while doing that I was also going to raves, listening to techno music, industrial electro, EBM or electronic as well as classical music and of course all the classics of the 60-70-80. My fav kind of music is however that one that goes between 84 and 94 tbh. that is because actually that was the kind of music i lived the most, before the internet came and i connected first time in December 94 and then a whole world opened and discovered even more stuff, even tho the dispersion of culture started to grow until that melting pot of cats, shit, fake news and bad music we have now on social media.
– How important are music videos in the industry today? How do they compare to videos from 20 years ago?
Victor: Well these days videos are everything because people have an attention span that is less than the time they need to read a tweet of 120 characters. That being said I think people should go a bit more retro and start to give more value to the music instead of a 50.000 eur video. Yeah of course Taylor Swift can make a vid for 1 billion euros and everybody is watching cause it’s some kind of fucking space movie, but the music? Sorry? Really…that’s not the kind of stuff I want for the music industry. When I was a teen I was listening to music and had no video to see. I didn’t even care about watching MTV or all that crap. Only important thing to me was to check some music out and get suggestions from my friends and listen to the music. More specifically listen to an album from the beginning to the end and not fucking skip every song after 20 seconds like kiddos are doing these days. We really need to slow down. But the thing is we are not allowed to do so. Today it’s not people searching for music anymore. It’s google suggesting it for you, or Facebook. That is a BIG trouble for quality. Because it’s all damn sponsored. I can see that on me too. I get all sort of crap music suggested to me. There is not even ONE single time i got suggested some good music. So that’s the power of Google AI? Gimme a break.
– In your career you have played with great musicians. What would be your greatest memories and achievements until now?
Victor: I have many great memories of tours, festivals, friends, fans and those will never go. We toured also with big bands and it was an honor for me. However I can say the most exciting experiences were our own tours, especially the one in Russia and USA in 2013. On the orad, with the van, exploring the world, meeting people. No bullshit and big stuff. Just like when i was 18 years old and playing in clubs, sleeping on the floor etc. That was a great experience.
– Where do you see music in general going in 100 years from now?
Victor: I think music will evolve into something strictly connected to holograms and virtual reality. I think there’ll probably be no more concert halls and stuff but most probably everything will go thru some VR headset or something. We’ve seen this happening already with the evolution of internet before Virtual Reality. So many clubs closing. People stay put in their house and just experience everything from their computer. I am not saying that I like this, but this is what’s gonna be and we cannot do anything to avoid that. Only thing we can do is to make it cool and try to not let this go in the hands of stupid major labels that are gonna fuck up everything like usual.
- Guenter Schulz Interview Slick Idiot Guitarist
- A Killer’s Confession Interview: Waylon Reavis and JP Cross (May 2017)
- Dino Cazares Interview | Fear Factory Guitarist
- John Moyer Interview: Disturbed and Fan Filmed Footage