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INTERVIEW VNV NATION
Sala Caracol, Madrid
3rd. September, 2000

Hi Ronan. How did VNV NATION get together and how did you come up with the group’s name?

Ronan Harris: Long story. It started around about 1990, when I arrived to London from Ireland – I come from Dublin -. Originally I founded an electronic project with two other people to make a soundtrack for a fictional film, which was kind of a …the music was a very intellectual sort of idea, just making the soundtrack music that was supposed to make up the idea what the film was.

The original name of the film was Nation and this developed into something a little bit more… in one direction towards making club EBM versions of the tracks which were very… some were orchestral, some were very chaotic, like all different styles. One of the tracks was called “Victory Non Vengeance” which was sort of a joke moto of mine. I come from Ireland, which is a country with lots of slogans and motos from its past, because of its History, or patriotism or whatever and I made up this fictional moto in this sort of style almost like a joke which was that if I had never left Ireland I would have never left the place and I’d probably sit there and in twenty years I’d see those who were left and regret… dislike them for doing so.

So I added the name on to the beginning of the project originally in order to give it some sort of a deep personal meaning for me, so that is how the name of the band came about. I moved off to Canada at the end of 1990 and I lived there for four years and I started to rewrite all new material and when I came back I met Mark and I started to update a lot of music and I had been signed by Discordia to release our first album and I met Mark who originally joined this just as a light drummer and became the second person in the band. So is a very short History of who we are.

 
How’d you describe your music?

Ronan: Hmmm… A combination of a lot of styles. I mean, basically it came from the EBM world. There are a lot of other elements blended into our music. I mean, it’s electronic, it can be considered as melancholic or uplifting… it’s different styles. I like to say that is very emotional music and that it has intelligent lyrics, with a depth of meaning. It seems that those who do listen to our music seems to be able to respond to and take very very personal to heart.

Basically I’d describe the music nowadays as being very uplifting electronic music, taking in combinations of contemporary dance styles. I like a lot of trance, I like a lot of different styles of electronic music. I also like classical, I like opera. I like a lot of 80’s music, I like a lot of 90’s music, I like music from the end of the millennium… I combine a lot of these together. But I think the basic sound is a very consistent solid dramatic and melancholic feel. I like to go for a very amphenic music. It is very difficult for me to stand back and say in any other terms what most people would describe a band by saying they sound like this, they sound like that… I mean, if the listener is familiar with bands such as Apoptygma Berzerk and Covenant, that’s the kind of area we fit in.

Tell us a little about the aesthetic of VNV NATION. We have seen you in some flyers wearing black military dress, jackboots, the flames…

Ronan: We don’t wear boots. I’m wearing Newrocks, they’re no military boots. Mark wears Newrocks, they’re no military boots either. I don’t think we have a military image. We wear on stage for the last four years, we’ve been wearing lycra tops and like club trousers. There’s nothing military about our clothes on stage.

The way we view our image it was intended originally to be as cynematic as possible. There’s a lot of influence from the film 1984 in our styling. I like modernism and I like the sort of take elements of this sort of retro-futurist imagery. And that should be the sort of the styling for the band. So… I wanted the image always to be consistent so from the second CD onwards , everything has always incorporated the same logo, same styling, same colours, giving the sense of imagery that should always be consistent on what we do. And everything is to reflect you have some.. even though is abstract is to have something to do with the release itself, so with “Praise The Fallen”, for example, the album was not about… it was a metaphore album going to what is about, because that is another question.

But the image on the front, for example, was a Polish war memorial for resistance fighters, which I thought was a very strong, very powerful image. But nobody would know what it is, so the image is distorted, the image is played with a lot. And all it is, is that in the imagery of each release there are many different elements which all tie together different interpretations of the title. And that reflects that within the lyrics there can be from five to seven different meanings for the lyrics. I can’t really put it any more than that, other than there it should be a strong and consistent…

I like the fact that the logo is one thing that you can put it… I wanted that after a while the logo was so recognizable. It’s like a trade-mark, like a company logo and a number of years ago I was in Mexico and I noticed that every organization in Mexico had this very sort of a strong styling on their logo. They paid so much attention for their logo that it should be remembered. It’s the trade-mark, so this is the sense sort of idea for me that I wanted this in the band.

The emblem, as we would call it, can be recognised without text. Wherever it is you know what it is and now I think that is very much the case. In countries like the U.S.A. or Germany you can put the logo on an album, you wouldn’t have to put any text, they know what it is. It’s like the :WUMPSCUT: logo. A particular styling which for him is very futurist, for us is something else.

What about the ideas of Nation and Empires?

Ronan: The two terms are very disconnected from each other. The notion of the nation is that out lyrics I think for people who feel a great deal. People who have a certain depth of feeling. These people often grow up isolated and find other people like them when they’re older. It doesn’t necessarily mean people who are gothic or anything like that, because I think there’s a lot of pretentious people in the scene who have got no depth with them whatsoever.

So what I mean is that the people regarded as a nation exist in all forms of life and I’ve met them through this music and was kind of originally when I wrote “Praise The Fallen” it was my opus about myself and everything I felt, I thought or I believed through my whole life. And this was also for other people’s life, because I knew so many who are trying to find some day their peace, but they were all individuals and as a series of individuals they could never ever be a nation.

There’s an irony to the title… it’s like a nation of individuals. The term “Empires” is just the title of our third album, and the notion of “Empires” was a many meaning word, an archetype. I am a very big fan of Carl Jüng and his notion of “archetypes” is that is a word which can have significance and meaning from very different people, all in different interpretations. But the word “Empires” is originally based on the idea that society reflects itself like chaos does. In Chaos Theory society from the top down can reflect to a person, can actually imitate a society just as societies are personalities. A large group of people together access a one-single personality. Many sociologists and group psychologists believe this.

The notion of “Empires” was that a single person can develop an empire. It was also at the same time the background to… I’m not exactly what you call the biggest fan of the European Union. I like the notion of a single Europe or an European Federation in a way, but I don’t particularly like the way is being done now. So at the time there were many different influences in why I should chose this title for. And I sat with a bunch of friends explaining that this word has so many different meanings for me, that each of these songs all tie too, in some way. I knew what the songs were, I knew what it was about, but I hadn’t the word that should describe it. There could be twenty different words which would describe the one thing which ties all the songs together. Is a background, is a connection… so the title came.

How did the idea to remix a track from “Das Ich” come to you?

Ronan: At the moment I don’t actually remember how we got asked to do the Das Ich remix. There were doing a CD of remixes from many different artists, this “Re-laborat” CD. We’ve done quite a few remixes in the past. What happened was… with all these remixes is always the same. I take very very little out from the original tracks.

I used the vocals from the Das Ich song and a couple of sounds and one evening I just said: OK, fine now. This is what the vocals sound like. I know how the original song sounds like. I don’t listen to it too much and I re-interpret how I think it should feel based on, say something like the voice. In many cases I base a remix around a voice or one single element or one single feeling within a song, and although I didn’t understand what the lyrics meant, I thought that’s the way it should sound. I didn’t like it when I made it. In fact I really thought it was a cliché… like an E.B.M. cliché. And it turns out to be the most successful remix we’ve done. That doesn’t really say a lot for the scene.

It’s just a simple, stripped-down, pure club song, like a club-hit. It has got a lot of power, maybe the power is in its simplicity and the combination of that sort of withheld emotion, like restrained aggression, or restrained energy or power in the music against the vocals. I think it worked very well in the end. I didn’t like it actually until I heard it in a club. Then I realised what was so good about it. But at the same time I liked it, of course. I just didn’t think that anybody else would.

The philosophy that goes with the music you make can be found in other music tendencies such as Dark Industrial, Ritual and so on. Do you think your public understand your lyrics?

Ronan: Quite a lot do, yes. I think they take a personal interpretation of them.

About the style I write, I must say I don’t write words with specific situations, I don’t think that’s right. That’s just not for me. I don’t want to write about a… oh! Today this happened to me and this girl said this or whatever… I write the thoughts and feelings of a person, that’s all, always based on a situation. Those thoughts and feelings are written in such an abstract way like when you get your thoughts and your emotions out.

But the situation of there about just not get described in many cases. And I find that most people who come to me with their own interpretations of my lyrics are not very far away from what the original song was about. I think the only one where it gets really misinterpreted…There are some people who really think they know it all, who post on the internet, who have made up in their minds. They know exactly what the song is about and they are going to tell you.

Well, I don’t really think it’s important. And the reason I don’t like to tell people what some songs are about is because there are people out there who have very very personal meanings for songs like “Solitary” and “Forsaken”, and are very similar. A lot of people write to me or come to me after concerts or whatever saying that the song has given them a great deal of strength and help them let go of feelings or express them in a way. Even though there are people in Germany who didn’t even understand what the lyrics were about, so that in a way they did understand.

I don’t expect everyone to, but I think the people I was talking about who I regard as the “nation”, do.

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