A: Peter Strickland
1. Can you tell us shortly about the Sonic Catering Band? When did it all
start and how many members are taking part in this project?
The Sonic Catering Band is named as such to save us the tedium of having to
describe what we sound like, what we are about or any of that bullshit.
The band came about in February 1996. I got together with my friend from
school, Jonathan Fletcher, only the two of us didn’t know how to mic-up a
stove, meaning we had to get John’s older brother Colin on board who is an
undisputed genius in electronics and unpunctuality. Our first public
performance was in September 1998. By this time, John had left and Tim Kirby
joined as a permanent member. Our first record appeared in August 1999. The
current line-up consists of Ádám Csenger, Colin Fletcher, Dan Hayhurst, Tim
Kirby, Colin Potter, Zsolt Sőrés, myself — Peter Strickland and Pál
Tóth. It should be noted that certain band members have never met each
other, let alone worked together.
2. How do you compose?, In your music it seems to me there are different
kinds of influences, from minimalism to improvised passing through the
industrial scene... is there any group or musician that influenced you in a
special way?
You could argue that what we’re practicing is the antithesis of experimental
music as most of our recordings have followed a very strict formula in that
we let a given recipe dictate how a certain track will sound and develop.
The recipe is our bible, our musical score, our physical lifeline. It also
gives us something to blame if we don’t come up with a very good track. A
typical Sonic Catering session involves three phases: cooking and recording
the meal in question; selecting and processing the raw sounds we want to use
and finally, editing and layering. Raw sonic and culinary ingredients both
become transformed into something thoroughly other both on plate and
headphones.
Influences — Since this is an Italian publication, I’ll wax lyrical about
Franco Battiato. His ‘Café-Table-Musik’ from 1977 still gets a hands down A+
from me every time I hear it. If that wasn’t enough, he hits the G-spot even
harder the year after with my personal favourite, ‘Jukebox.’ That whole
period of experimentation for him in the 70’s is so undocumented. Why? A lot
of us from England could name at least five all-out classic albums by him,
only our knowledge is all from word of mouth. He’s quite a big name in
Italy, but only for the bland pop he’s produced since 1978. I’d get more
enjoyment listening to Vasco Rossi. But Franco is still the Father when it
comes to cut-up surrealism, prog-out action and hypnotic repetition. I’ll
stop before I get started on the equally A-grade ‘M. Elle Le Gladiator.’
1960’s/1970’s Italy is just as significant if not more so than the same
period in Germany. Aside from Battiato, you had other trailblazers such as
Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, not forgetting Ennio Morricone who could either
turn to blissful pop or mind bending avant-garde with schizophrenic ease.
And for pre-electro thrills, you had Giorgio Moroder circa ‘E=MC_’ although
maybe that was more to do with Munich. The Italian Cramps label was also
paramount in distributing works by John Cage, Martin Davorin Jagodic, Alvin
Lucier and Costin Miereanu to name a few. Some of the strangest stuff I’ve
heard has been on that label, some of the most unlistenable too. In terms of
the album, our main influence is The Győr Girls’ Choir. I listened to
their version of Kodály’s ‘Mountain Nights’ endlessly when I first arrived
in Hungary. I thought the human voice couldn’t get anymore pure and ethereal
than Ligeti’s choral work until I heard ‘Mountain Nights.’ Their singing
comes from somewhere else and their influence can be felt on quite a large
chunk of our album.
I went to Győr in Transdanubia twice to see if I could find the choir
only to realise that their conductor, Miklós Szabó was based right under my
nose at the Liszt Academy in Budapest. I played him our ‘White Light from an
Oven Above’ track which owes a lot to his choir. He listened to it in this
opulent art nouveau cloakroom with headphones on and showed some mild
interest, only when someone politely announces that they are almost eighty
years old and very busy, you have to read between the lines.
3. What relation do you have with food? Do you like to cook or is it just
something you connect to the music?
It was important to anchor our music with a universal reference both
conceptually and aurally. I’d hope that we offer the uninitiated a bridge
into another world via the smell of the cooking. We are opening up the world
of electro-acoustics and musique concrète through a very accessible
conceptual entry point without having to compromise the sound itself. Food
is the perfect metaphor for sound construction and in no uncertain terms we
were outwardly displaying our working methods through the culinary analogy.
Our primary interest was the sound and the cooking has too often served only
as a proverbial coat hanger. It seemed that sometimes our recipes were
totally incongruous to what we were trying to convey with the sound. The
concept was there, but not the spirit. I now get more embarrassed by a bad
recipe than a bad track. When we started, cooking was just a means of
staying alive. I didn’t really know what cooking was beyond heating up some
beans. Sonic Catering in 1996 and ’97 was just one culinary abortion after
another. It was easier to get my Mum or my then girlfriend in. Now I’m far
more adept in the kitchen than I am in the studio. I think in some ways what
has prevented the band from moving on in a culinary sense is the vegetarian
quotient. If you’re seriously going to engage with a country’s culinary
culture then you have to get blood on your hands. Sacrificial offerings
still play a very important part in a multitude of different cultures and
religions. I used to read about Shintoism and other Far East religions’
incorporation of ritual and sacrifice when it came to food. In the West,
food is seen as either incidental to the culture or we simply appropriate
from other countries. In a sense, food is a remarkably accurate indicator of
a culture’s identity or more poignantly, it’s erosion. You only need to
witness the amount of Western fast food outlets sprouting up like weeds
throughout Eastern Europe to see how virulent capitalist homogeny can be and
how paradoxically its financial and aesthetic grip is not too dissimilar in
its uniformity to that of the Communist era. You can understand a very poor
country such as Romania that has undergone a savage transition from
Communism, needing an economic adrenalin shot in the form of several fast
food outlets. And it is very easy for us as foreigners to criticise. The
exotic thrill of going into or even working in a fast food outlet for a
Romanian ten or so years ago must be tantamount to what it is for us to go
into the Carpathian Mountains for the first time. But long term, you have to
ask a lot of questions. ‘Fast Food Nation’ by Eric Schlosser certainly puts
the case forward for a lot you would’ve known, suspected and more. After
reading it, it’s no longer the animals I feel so sorry for. On that note, I
should mention that contrary to what our records purport, most Sonic
Catering members are carnivores. I don’t really have an issue with livestock
being killed for food, but I do have an issue with how most of those animals
are treated when they are alive, hence the fact I don’t eat meat or poultry.
Saying that, sometimes you have little choice when the stuff is already on
your plate. One thing I can’t stand about certain vegetarians is their
refusal to eat meat if it’s already on their plate. If you’re a hog and
you’re going to get slaughtered and you end up in the bin just because some
principled vegetarian wants to make a point, you’re not going to take too
kindly to that. Colin in the band takes that argument one step further. I
used to argue with him about his predilection for certain pasties, both on
an olfactory and ethical level. His reasoning is that by consuming
mechanically-recovered meat, you are efficiently cleaning up all the
by-products that nobody wants to know about in their steak or whatever. The
demand has already been created by the more fussy meat-eaters and Colin is
just making sure that the rest of the animal carcass has gone to a needy
stomach instead of a bin. Are those the words of an altruistic vegetarian in
disguise or is this guy trying to pull the wool over my eyes? But going back
a little; I have thought seriously about doing some kind of sonic culinary
travelogue; fully embracing anything to do with meat and not doing any
processing with the sounds. We’ve done a few things which have appropriated
Far East religions in a very loose sense, what with very austere sounds and
silence, but this is dilettante hocus-pocus. We should get out there and do
the real thing. I attempted something in Sarajevo when I was staying with a
Muslim woman in the hills, only I ended up with egg on my face mainly due to
the language barrier. I thought she understood that I wanted to record her
cooking a special meat dish and after coming back from a brief sojourn to
get batteries for my recorder, the dish was already made. A double whammy
there as I also got food poisoning. Bosnia-Hercegovina is the perfect
starting place for a sonic catering odyssey in that it’s the first
predominantly Eastern culture in Europe in terms of geographical bearings
and then you can travel through the Balkans and on into Turkey, through
Northern Iraq and Iran onwards. That would be a dream come true and then do
it every ten years, more as an anthropological than sonic pursuit.
4. Do the compositions reflect in some way the recipe you are working
with or is it only a way you use to make your music?
The best example of a track inherently displaying the character of its
recipe is ‘Bodypop.’ Popcorn isn’t exactly a high-class dish and we
responded accordingly with a pretty low-class electro dance number. I really
love ‘Bodypop’ — that was definitely our party track, spreading positivity
all over the world.
5. Can you tell us about your collaborations? You have been working with
Clare Connors and with Michael Prime. They seem to have two very different
approches to the music; how was it to work with them?
Contrary to what has been written, none of us have ever worked with Michael
Prime. We did a split Christmas single together several years ago, only that
was a case of us going off to make a Christmas Pudding to record and Mike
climbing up a tree to find some Mistletoe to record. His background in
ecology and natural history brings in a unique perspective on how he works
with sound. It’s no put-on when he uses plants as his source material,
partly to demonstrate how subtle internal or external environmental factors
can affect the fluctuation of sound. His interviews are always fascinating,
drawing your attention to what is beyond the scope of your ears and eyes.
Both him and Francisco López are redefining our interpretations of wildlife
recording through their recordings and essays. ‘La Selva’ by López and
‘L-Fields’ by Prime are exemplary in that respect. ‘L-Fields’ is without
question the first inherently psychedelic album in its bioelectrical use of
psychoactive plants.
We met Clare Connors through her involvement with The Balanescu Quartet. I
was always quite a big Peter Greenaway fan and I saw the potential for some
tenuous culinary link between The Balanescu Quartet and us knowing that they
played on ‘The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover’ soundtrack. Clare’s
arrangements on Spiritualized’s ‘Pure Phase’ and ‘Ladies and Gentlemen we
are Floating in Space’ albums also had quite an effect on me. It started off
with Clare performing a ‘remix’ for our ‘Artificial Additives’ album and
then we carried on just messing around essentially, rehearsing for this gig
we were going to do together at London’s Lux Cinema in 1999. I wasn’t really
there at the time, despite my physical presence. I was supposed to turn up
with a blender on one occasion only I forgot the bottom half, so we made do
with a power drill I had instead. Because we were just recording rehearsals
for our own reference, we didn’t really consider anything beyond hitting the
record button, only some of the pieces were so beautiful in their immediacy
that we knew that this could never be recreated. We cleaned the tapes up as
much as we could and it’s just been pressed-up as a rather lovely 10" and
without the power drill too.
6. Can you introduce us to your "The First Supper" release?
The First Supper was our first project — a five-course dinner packaged into
five separate 10" records (starter, soup, main course, side dish and
dessert) in a pizza box. Each 10" course came with two variations on that
specific dish with the recipe printed on the sleeve. A learning experience
for us all. There are things we would’ve done differently both in terms of
sound and packaging. The recipes and our cooking left a lot to be desired
too as mentioned earlier. But we’re still incredibly proud of having
realised the whole project. It took a long time — from 1996 to 1999, partly
because of the cost. Everything seemed to work conceptually, right down to
the 10"s themselves being the size of standard plates. We tried to match the
timings of the records to how long it would take one to eat each dish. The
packaging was blatantly ripped-off from what you see on any food you buy. I
was heavily anti-art at the time and wanted to take the food manufacturing
route and make the whole band as faceless, nameless and uniform as possible.
I wanted the records with their standard gingham colour-coded design to look
plain and mass produced. In hindsight, they don’t look plain enough. Image
is always paramount even if it is a non-image.
7. You have been producing the 7" Purely Practical of the Bohman Brothers on
your Peripheral Conserve label, how did you come across them? How important
in your work is it to produce other artists’ work?
I came across Adam Bohman one night at Michael Prime’s house. I used to see
him when I was living in Brixton getting on night buses with an ungodly
array of sticks, canes and other paraphernalia protruding from a laundry
bag. I didn’t know who he was then, only he had LMC written all over him. I
used to go to the Bonnington Café sometimes where both Adam and his brother
Jonathan would host their Monday night concerts. One night in March last
year the brothers performed ‘Purely Practical’ and I instantly begged them
to let me put it out on my label. It’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever
heard — two gentlemen in their early forties with a nice line in tweeds
reading from DIY catalogues as if it was a Gnostic mantra. The quality of
the recording is very distinctive too as they do all their stuff at home on
tape. It sounds as if it was beamed down from some 1970’s BBC Public
Information Service. I still can’t get my head around what possessed them. I
bow down before The Bohman Brothers. They have something you and I don’t and
lots of it too. They look incredible as well which is always important. One
of the highlights of last year was taking them to the Rudas Baths in
Budapest. Whether they’re in loincloths or tweeds, they cut it like no one
else.
Putting out records by other people is no more financially insane than
putting out our own. There are certain recordings you come across that you
know no one else will touch, so I guess a nurturing instinct overshadows any
financial rationality. Saying that, when I was putting The Bohman Brothers
single together, I was convinced that this was just a labour of love and no
one would be interested. It turned out to be the most successful and fastest
selling release on the label and is close to selling-out. When we put
together, ‘Artificial Additives’ we were convinced we could press and sell
1000 copies given that five of the people on that album can easily sell that
much by themselves. It turned out to be our worst selling release by a mile.
It’s impossible to predict what will or won’t sell which ultimately is a
healthy thing, otherwise you end up motivated by the wrong things. Money
though does always come into the equation no matter how pure your motives
are and when due to circumstances, you can only press very small numbers,
it’s more of a loss margin you have to be thinking about than profit. My day
jobs and record sales combined could never sustain the Peripheral Conserve
label. It gets to the point of seriously encroaching on your quality of
life. Making music doesn’t have to cost much now. Manufacturing is the
hurdle. I’ve just got a few more releases to finish off, then someone else
can put out our work if they want. One of the releases should be very
special if it materialises. I can’t say too much about it for that very
reason, but it will revolve around piano music by this old raconteur in
Budapest who used to compose jingles for the Hungarian National Radio in the
1970’s and at the dawn of capitalism he became destitute. He’s quite a
legend in certain quarters of Budapest for one reason or another. His whole
life story would make a film, depending on which version you believe. From
the second minute he started talking to me in a bar, I knew he was a genius.
From that night on, it took me nine months to get his number, so you see,
you might have to wait a while for this one if it appears.
8. I’ve seen in one track you have been working with Steve Stapleton,
what relationship do you have with him/Nurse with Wound and in general how
do you fit into the English underground experimental scene?
I first knew Steve Stapleton back in 1996, albeit in a very limited
capacity. It wasn’t until 2001, that I actually got to stay with him in
Ireland for a few days around the time he was doing a remix and some artwork
for us. It was a little like visiting the kingdom of the Jedi Knight, what
with his little round dark glasses and the pointy beard. He is one of
music’s great visionaries and that is only the half of it if you are lucky
enough to see where he lives. I’ve never come across anyone who throws so
much love and energy into everything they do. The whole environment in which
his family live is thoroughly unique and inspiring, though I imagine it’s
not all beer and skittles when it comes to winter. He is still seen by so
many of us as a figurehead, not only for his music, but for his
dissemination of other peoples’ work through the legendary Nurse with Wound
list. He introduced me to the Italian Cramps label, Franco Battiato and The
Paris Sisters for which I am eternally grateful for. I’m not so grateful for
having been subjected to the likes of Guru Guru and Xhol’s infamous
‘Motherfuckers GMBG & CO KG’ album. That stuff would be confiscated if he
had neighbours. But beyond the remix and a short stay with him at the time,
I don’t really know him at all. It was just one of those rare treats in
life.
I don’t have any real gauge of how we figure in the English underground,
especially as I’m hardly a resident anymore. I don’t think we figure at all
since you can’t buy our records in England. I tend to stick with Anomalous
Records in the States for the sake of a peaceful life. Our sales are usually
in the low hundreds which will give you some idea of how insignificant we
are. I think our name is more known than our music. I had a lot of fun when
I was in London and there was definitely a certain urgency and excitement
about being surrounded by people doing similar things. People such as Alex
Holmes from They Came from the Stars; I Saw Them and Vanishing Breed were on
an endless quest, but he’s also another example of someone who quit London
for more Eastern shores. Our split singles and remix album certainly reflect
that London period, but I really wanted to live another life elsewhere
whilst I still had the chance and London wages don’t go very far towards the
rent regardless of whether you’re putting out records or not. It’s the best
decision I made, though I’m hopelessly out of touch now. The last record I
bought was a Devo compilation, which doesn’t shed too much light on any 2002
music explosions.
9. Which is your best recipe? Which is the one that sorted out as to be the
best track and the one you would like to work at and you haven’t done yet?
We did a track called, ‘Interculinary Dimension’ which derived its sounds
from a Balkan soup. We slowed down the electric hand whisk we were using on
the cucumber/garlic mix and multi-tracked it at different frequencies to
produce a UFO drone swallowed whole. It was disarmingly quick and easy to
make both the food and the track. Quite an exception in output relating to
input. Here’s the recipe:
1 cucumber
3 garlic cloves
10g salt
75g walnut pieces
40g bread pieces
30ml sunflower oil
400ml sheep’s yoghurt
110ml cold water
10ml lemon juice
25ml olive oil
handful of fresh dill
50g pine nuts
Cut cucumber in two and peel half of it.
Dice cucumber flesh and set aside.
Crush garlic and salt together, adding walnuts and bread.
Add sunflower oil and mix well.
Transfer mixture into large bowl and beat in yoghurt and diced cucumber.
Add cold water and lemon juice.
Garnish with olive oil, dill and pine nuts.
As for the recipe we haven’t got round to doing yet; maybe something really
obvious like a full English breakfast.
10. Do you know of other people working in the same way?
There are quite a few jokers now who have come to our attention, doing
similar stuff. I tend to turn a blind eye to all these wacky chefs thinking
how original they are micing-up their pans and serving food to the audience.
Daytime television is theirs for the taking. In terms of people who are
really trying to move things on and redefine how we interpret
non-instrumental sound and music, we’ll happily nominate Matt Herbert,
Francisco López , Matmos, Michael Prime, The First Viennese Vegetable
Orchestra and Matt Wand. But going back to the Italians again, the template
was there with the Futurists almost a hundred years ago.
11. Can you give as your 10 favourite dishes?
I have a really nice recipe passed on to me by a friend called Jozef Cseres.
I have this on tape too. It’s a Slovakian Sheeps’ Cheese Special. You make
the gnocchi yourself by grating raw potatoes and mashing them up with flour
into balls. You boil the gnocchi balls and in another pan, you mix the
Sheeps’ Cheese with full cream and a little milk and then mix. Fantastic.
Another one to get you salivating is a Hungarian spread known as körözött
which comes from Liptauer cheese which you press through a sieve and then
mix with butter, salt, red paprika and finely chopped onions. Pál Tóth makes
killer körözött.
Every Sunday we go to his apartment to drink beer, eat körözött and listen
to The New Blockaders.
For a quick protein fix, I make an omelette using two eggs, with goats’
cheese sprinkled on top, along with chopped red onions, tomatoes, pine nuts
and a liberal dashing of pomegranate juice. It’s far quicker, cheaper and
healthier than a ready-meal. I do try and watch my diet now that I’m leaving
my twenties behind. The fact that you’re in the same physical shape as you
were in your teens can be very deceptive. I know my body is changing just by
the fact I can’t handle heavy drinking anymore and that my dentist’s
receptionist knows my voice on the phone. I’ve had to cut down my chocolate
intake quite drastically. I used to get through twelve bars a day for years
— almost as expensive as smoking. I’m now down to two or three and I’m
working on getting it down to one. My body is so accustomed to getting a
regular sugar fix, so I guess for my fourth choice of favourite dish, I’ll
nominate anything with chocolate, but I’d rather not go into anymore detail
than that. I’m trying to steer my mind onto other things.
Sag Ponir is another favourite; spinach fried with cumin and cottage cheese.
Grilled aubergine slices drizzled with balsamic vinegar is always a winner.
Make sure you sprinkle plenty of chopped and diced red onion, cucumber and
tomato.
Penne pasta mixed in with sun-dried tomato paste, fried baby spinach and
pine nuts and then baked in the oven with a grated cheddar topping and bread
crumbs.
Puff pastry filled with capers and boiled spinach is extra formidable if you
dip it into avocado/pomegranate juice paste. Not to everyone’s taste. For
you non-vegetarians, scallop soup made with coconut milk and fresh ginger
grated in will have you barking for more. For the tenth recipe, I’ll pick
anything flesh free from Claudia Roden’s ‘The Book of Jewish Food.’ I’ve
only just started reading it, but already it comes highly recommended in its
interweaving of history, cultural traditions and food in Jewish communities
throughout the world. I also have a soft-spot for the 1950’s American Betty
Crocker cook books. They’re filled with a host of useful extra-curricular
tips for the kitchen, such as ‘notice humorous and interesting incidents to
relate at dinnertime when family is together.’
12. Do you play gigs? What are your plans for the future?
We stopped performing live at the end of 2001 for a number of reasons.
Ultimately, we felt we weren’t capable of maintaining the kind of intensity
we initially envisaged. I wanted live gigs to be a sensory assault. I’d seen
My Bloody Valentine and Crash Worship in the early 1990’s and found both
bands incredibly cathartic. Seeing Crash Worship was like being thrown into
a Jodorowsky film. I only saw them twice in New York, at Brownies and The
Cooler in 1994. The whole set-up was not too dissimilar to what Boredoms are
doing now, what with the en masse drum work-outs, only more rudimentary and
less disciplined. What made the whole thing with Crash Worship so
disorientating was the volume, relentlessness and their crazed entourage. I
used to know this girl called Otter who used to do her ‘Trip and Go-Naked’
striptease at The Pyramid with Baby Dee on accordian. The first time I met
her was at a Crash Worship performance, totally naked, lying on a bed of
exotic fruit covered in blood and red wine. People were either cutting
themselves up that night or having pigs’ blood thrown at them. There was a
real sense of ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ I’d never been to a Joe
Coleman or G.G. Allin performance, so this was as extreme as it got for me.
A Sonic Catering performance was civilised in comparison. Besides, we don’t
believe in throwing food let alone blood or shit. But at the back of our
collective mind, we were always trying to recreate that thrill with blenders
and high volume sizzling. Now and again we’d hit on something approaching
that rock n’ roll surge, but more often than not, we were wondering why we
even bothered turning up. It just seemed that stopping was the right thing
to do. Trashing food blenders onstage is compulsory when you’re 25 but not
when you’re 30. I also got so sick of having to worry about the food as well
as the sound. A venue will have a PA, but what about a decent place to wash
your vegetables?
I think doing After Dinner speeches would be the next appropriate step for
us in terms of live appearances. I’d really love to get into that. We’d be
lucky if we got the equivalent of 15 Euros for most gigs, which doesn’t even
cover your food or transport costs. You can get a good few hundred Euros for
an After Dinner speech and you just turn up with your best neckerchief on
and maybe a pack of playing cards if you run out of things to say. But for
the majority of the world who missed out on our live capers, we’ve culled
two hours of very classy material for a forthcoming live double CD on
Nicolas Genital Grinder’s Absurd label. He has quite a legacy in issuing and
disseminating noise music. The first Merzbow CD I bought was part produced
by him, so it’s quite an honour to have his approval and get to hear all his
bad jokes. One of the live CDs is a collage of our most intense and
ridiculous moments and the other is a whole unedited performance we did in
Geneva which is about the only gig we did that went according to plan. It’s
the steak au poivre of live albums. We’ve taken out all the fat, gristle and
waste, leaving you with a super-lean offering. I had the idea of following
Colin’s pasty ethos by compiling the hours of dire live footage we scrapped
and putting out several of these CDs for sale in petrol stations.
Our plans for the future involve getting the album completed for now. The
last year in Hungary has been a huge influence on it. The atmosphere of the
studio we use is certainly creeping into the recordings. It’s situated on a
Danube island. You have to take a low rickety footbridge to get there. It’s
beautiful during winter nights with all the mist. The engineer used to work
for the Hungarian National Radio in the 1970’s and has a few tales of his
own about my piano player friend mentioned earlier. Some of our recordings
have involved 1" tape and because that stuff is so rare and expensive, the
engineer erases old reels from the radio. It feels like we’re aiding him in
a bid to erase Hungarian socialist history. I made a few personal tapes of
stuff before it got erased. He had this hour long reel from a 70’s political
conference with all the translators multi-tracked, so you had these very
stern voices in Russian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, etc. and once you
run a little reverb through it all, the whole thing sounds vast. Anyway, I’m
digressing. I don’t know what will happen beyond the album. When we started,
we were adamant that we’d stop after The First Supper. The whole thing was
just meant to be a one-off experiment and I thought we’d be through by the
end of 1997, only as you can see, we got a little carried away.
13. You are living in Budapest, how different is the music scene in Hungary,
and how do people react toward your music?
There is a very active scene in Hungary centred around a publication called
Magyar Műhely which begun in 1962 six years after the uprising. The
initial covert spirit of Magyar Műhely is there, but this is now more
to do with indifference than repression. However, persistence pays and
Magyar Műhely is regarded highly as a comprehensive publication on art,
performance art, literature, music, film and philosophy. There are very
strong links with people in both Slovakia and Austria which also extends to
the Heyermears Discorbie label and Tilos Radio which is on the verge of
becoming legal. If you really want to know what underground means, talk to
some of these guys who have spent six months in jail under the Communists
just for indulging in a little performance art. There are some interesting
bands over there; Budapastis, SKY, én, The Abstract Monarchy Trio. Someone
will always turn up to one of these events and pull off some brief
performance art frenzy just to throw everyone out of whack. A lot of those
guys now guest on Sonic Catering recordings. They’re definitely adding a
different dimension to our sound and they seem to warm enough to the project
just by the sheer fact that they’re involved.
14. Can you give us the recipe that gives you more satisfaction in working
with and that the result you found to be especially successful?
We don’t give away trade secrets.
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