Neotek

Hello my Danish friends! How are you?
Jens: - "We are doing great, thank you. Most of all we are finally relaxed and excited because our new album finally is released!"

First of all, tell us a bit more about Neotek!
Jens: - "The story is looong! As a band we have roots more than 20 years back to 1985, but the real story of Neotek starts around 1992 where the three of us Henrik Jensen, Jacob Neis and Jens Petersen was experimenting with making innovative electronic music without any other purpose than to do good music. Three years later Henrik and Jacob started Good Courage, and decided to release some of the old Neotek songs as a side project. So Neotek released their first album and then stopped."
Jacob: - "Around 2000/2001 we got the idea to restart Neotek still with the purpose to do innovative electronic music, but this time around also to take it to the stage (we never played live the first time around). We started out with eight members, but shortly after that we were only six, and we used a lot of time finding the direction of this new incarnation of Neotek. Then we got to play some great concerts and were close to finishing the new album when half of our members one by one left during 2005-2006. So we actually restarted Neotek once again in 2007 and we redefined the musical style and attitude once again, also we had to set up a new studio and find out new ways of working just the three of us."

You have just released your album 'Sex, Murder and Rock'n'Roll', tell us a bit more about it?
Jens: - "It was important for us this time to do a proper album, a kind of concept album where the lyrics, the music, the style of singing, the general sound-design and even the album cover would be combined to compose a homogeneous whole. This is something we never thought about when making the 'Brain Over Muscle' album. And in 2007, before we started writing the remaining seven songs, we started tossing ideas around about the concept of the album. We wanted a concept that was clearly visible, but not so tight that we could not explore different musical and textual paths. So we ended up with the idea of telling eleven stories of people in some extreme situations on top of eleven very distinct compositions."

How come it took you 14 years between your first album and this second one (excluding the EP and re-release)?
Henrik: - "It would seem as if we had been working a very long time on this album, but all together we do not really feel it has been such a long time. First we had the break for five years with Neotek. And after the restart of Neotek we had to find ourselves and see how we would all work together. Then we set a deadline for the album for release in spring 2006, just in time for our concert at Wave Gotik Treffen. The deadline wasn't met, and because some of the members left during the second half of 2006, the entire album was scrapped. We only kept four songs, three of which we totally reworked. We resumed working on the album in mid 2007. 18 months later the music was finished, and the next five months were spent mixing and mastering the whole thing. So actually, it only took us two years altogether to write record and mix it. Looking back, we feel that we made the right decision in not rushing the album, and we are very proud of the way the album turned out!"

What groups have influenced you when shaping your music to what it is today?
Jens: - "Well a lot of different bands influence us on different levels, and we can namedrop a few of them, but there are of course many more. We admire Nine Inch Nails for constantly coming up with new creative ways of writing and producing music during his entire career, and we like both the music and performance of Prodigy and Front 242. But also underground names like Welle:Erdball and Combichrist are inspiring. And all the inspirations from other bands, from movies and from other cultural phenomenon are put into a big melting pot and out in the other end come new Neotek music."

Your album cover is pretty violent with nude content, how did you come up with it and tell me about the design and designer.
Jens: - "We never really saw the cover as violent or with nude content. For us the cover is a part of the artistic concept of the album. We designed the cover and shot the photos ourselves, while leaving it to professionals to polish it and set it up for printing. The cover represents the lyrics and the feel of some of the songs. We never intended it to be provocative, only to signal the content of our music and a piece of photo art."
Jacob: - "In fact we are genuinely surprised that anyone could get offended by a cover like ours in this day and age. Just look at splatter movie covers (even commercial ones) they are much more explicit and violent. And nudity is everywhere! But the German distributor, MySpace and several online shops have already censored our cover. It seems like we are going in to yet another puritanical time with the Rammstein censoring and now our censoring as well."

You are currently signed with Black Rain, have you known them since before and they where aware of your work during the 90's, or did your new tracks convince them?
Jens: - "We met Jörg Freier back in 2004 at one of our concerts and he loved both the old and the new stuff we had done at that time. Later Jörg became a part of Black Rain and we also met Gerald and he loved our stuff as well, so it seemed natural to sign with them. Black Rain is also a label that is in the music business because they love and care for the alternative music scene and release high quality dark music. This profile fits Neotek perfectly because we are doing music for similar reasons: Simply because we just can't stop exploring our musical possibilities. For Neotek it is important to work together with people you can trust and people that really like the music we make, so that is why we signed with Black Rain."

Do you have any touring or concert plans?
Henrik: - "We do. In February we will introduce a completely new Neotek live show with two concerts in Denmark and Germany ¬ and then we hope that the new album will spawn some more concert activity during 2010. We plan to play as much as possible because performing our music live for an audience is very important to us. It gives us the inspiration to go back in the studio to compose new songs; songs are often composed because we want to play them live."

So... do we have to wait another 14 years for the next album release?
Jacob: - "No. We are going to start writing new music very soon, and then we will see when we are finished, but it will definitely be a lot faster than 14 years!"

Any last words to our readers?
Jens: - "We hope that there will be a lot more 'Sex, Murder & Rock'n'Roll' in your lives soon!"