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Interview with Sun Caged - Sun Caged
This interview was done on November 15'th by Tajs & Steen before the Sun Caged concert in Kolding. We met the whole band in the hall and went upstairs to have a talk. A fridge with beers was in the corner, so everything was in place. Everybody in the band were active during the interview, but typing this in I had a pretty hard time recognising who was who, so usually I have just referred to them as Sun Caged :) Mostly it was Marcel (Guitar) and Dennis (Drums) doing the talking.
Steen: I know you arrived here in Kolding last night.
Sun Caged: Yeah...
Steen: I mean, why? You must have been bored out of your mind. What have you been doing?
Dennis: Well, we woke up at 8:30 and then we found a bakery to have breakfast and then we just called the booker of this venue, what the hell we should do (laughs) and he told us just to drive to his place and hang out. Then after 30 minutes we decided we should just go here. So I think all our equipment was up at noon (Laughs).
Tajs: Nice long sound check then?
Dennis: No, we didn't have a sound check at all actually. The sound engineer only arrived at six I think.
Steen: So you haven't discovered anything exciting in Kolding then?
Sun Caged (Dennis): No... Well, only that the girls at the bakery don't speak English (Laughs). And the girls at the Steak house were delicious. Yummie! haha
Steen: Ok, I have to ask how and when the band got together?
Sun Caged (Marcel): Well, actually in 1999 somewhere I was still in the band Lemur Voice. Around that time Dennis got on my ICQ. ICQ is a chat program on the Internet. We began to chat and no, I think that was 1998 actually.
Sun Caged (Dennis): Yeah I think it was in September 1998.
Sun Caged (Marcel): I was searching for a drummer to do some Pantera covers for just one night and he was like "Yeah, I should do that, I like that a lot" so we rehearsed two times and did the gig and that went pretty well and after that we decided to form this project. At that time it was still a project called Sun Caged and we just wrote some songs and did a few rehearsals. We asked Rob, who I knew vaguely through my bassist for Lemur Voice. I called him and he agreed to come and play with us. That's when we wrote the first two songs which also appeared on Scar Winter, the first EP we did with some guest musicians.
We got some guest musicians around that time to play with us on the demo. After that when Lemur Voice broke up, I was like "Why don't we make a real band?" because my main band has gone, so we just made Sun Caged a real band. At first we found Joost.
Steen: How did you find him?
Sun Caged (Marcel): We found him through and ad in a magazine and he responded to that. He came the first time, taking with him a cd on which he had recorded some samples. We were already like "Oh, my fucking god. He's really awesome". We kind of rehearsed and the first jam was just great. We clicked immediately, so that went really well. I think he was 18 at the time.
(Dennis): Yeah, we were really sceptic when he walked in... (laughs). Seriously, he told us he was 18 so we emailed and we were like "How the hell is someone that is 18 going to be good?". Almost all 18 year old musicians are not very good, so we were really surprised. When he sat down and played we were just like, "What the fuck!" (Laughs)
(Marcel): At fist after auditioning singers for, I don't know how long, maybe a year, we found Sascha. Sascha was the singer who sung on the Dominion mini album. After that he decided to quit the band, because he was not as into the music as we are. We really want to tour the world and get big with it and he was just like "Well, I do it more for fun" and so, we had to find a new singer. We saw Andre perform with his previous band and we were all stunned by his performance, so we just decided to ask him. So that's how we got this lineup.
Tajs: How many live shows have you played together?
Sun Caged (Dennis): With this line up, already a lot. I think about 15 gigs already. I think André's first show was in Copenhagen. Yes, it was in Denmark. I think we have done 15 or 16 with André and in total. The first real show we did was in September 2001, so that's a year and three months ago. I think we did around 40-45 shows shows. So that's almost one each weekend, a little less than one...
Tajs: Can you live from this?
Sun Caged (Marcel): No no no, I teach music though, so that makes the living, but with the band, no. I think the music is too complicated for that. It's not music that people will hear on the radio and stuff like that. We can't make a living out of it because we're still a demo band. We really need a debut album, which we will record next year, but even then I don't think we will make a living of it. The only way to make a living of it is if your cd is on Hit Parades and your songs are on the radio. The only way to get money is to get royalties from being played on the radio.
Steen: You don't get anything from sales?
Sun Caged (Dennis): Yeah also sales but our genre is not going to sell enough. You have to sell really a lot to earn big money. I think not even a band like Dream Theater can make a living from selling cd's. They make a living from the touring and the merchandising. But not from selling cd's.
Sun Caged (Marcel): It's really a combination of all kinds of stuff. Playing live is very important I think. Playing live is the way to show people what you're like and I think that is the best way to let the band shine.
Tajs: Is that also why you play with other bands, to get out to other people?
Sun Caged (Dennis): Yeah we do have some side projects as well, but that's very different from Sun Caged actually.
Tajs: I was thinking about playing concerts with other bands.
Sun Caged (Dennis): Well, yeah, I think so because the Danish band playing here is maybe pretty well known around here. I dont know, but I suppose so. Tonight the bands were put together by the booker. I don't know the bands and I never knew them before.
Steen: I don't think the other two bands are playing the same style as you.
Sun Caged (Marcel): No, the first band is a little into the progressive scene, more like straight forward metal probably. But Bonehouse, I really don't how it's going to work with those bands together.
Sun Caged (Marcel): It doesn't matter anyway, because if people will come here and see us play. Even if they don't normally like the music we try to have a really energetic stage performance.
Sun Caged (Dennis): People that don't really like the kind of music we play and come to the show, usually give us compliments afterwards anyway. Even people that, for example my girlfriend, she would not put on our cd, but the loves seeing us live, just because of the energy and the partying that's going on. People that don't like the music can still enjoy the show. Yhat's what we like.
Sun Caged (Rob): Even my parents say the same thing. They really like it. It's not just giving compliments and like "Oh you're very good, I'm just very proud of you." They really like it, especially live.
Tajs: You take your parents to the live shows?
Sun Caged (Rob): Yeah. Especially with the open air shows, they came along and they were stunned. Because I play death metal and stuff like that. Well a long time ago actually...
Steen: Well, I've listened to the songs from Dominion and those from the website. I think it's really brilliant music. I can't really find any band to compare you to.
Sun Caged (Marcel): Oh, that's good. It's really great to hear, because on some websites and some magazines people compare us to Dream Theater all the time, and I think it's... I understand why it is. Dream Theater is the biggest band in the business in that style and if people see a keyboard player, guitarist, bassist, singer and drummmer. That setup and sound which has keyboard, strings and also with higher vocals, People would always compare to Dream Theater. You can't avoid it.
(Dennis): At some point it's not even a problem, but at some point it's irritating because we have a lot of other influences. When people compare you to Dream theater, you could see it as a compliment of course because they are the biggest, well, and if they are the best i wouldn't say, but they became the biggest, so it's a compliment that you're being compared to Dream Theater. But if they are going to say that we sound like Dream Theater, like they bring it in a way that we want to sound like them, and sometimes they just tell people stuff like they know what's going on in our minds, like the singer has been listening too much to James Labrie, like why the fuck would he say that? You don't know what's going on in his life, and even so how could you know that he's listening to James Labrie. You've never been at his home you know.
Steen: It's easy to say
Sun Caged (Dennis): That's just what I don't like. It's cool to be compared in terms of accomplishments, but it's not fair to be compared if they want you to look like a wannabe. We don't want to be like them. We are not going to write a song and go "We want this song to sound like Dream Theater". And that's what people suggest that we're doing sometimes. But I guess it's also because we used to play a Dream Theater cover live and we also recorded one two years ago for a tribute that never came out. But that's another story.
Steen: Which one did you record?
Sun Caged (Marcel): We recorded Caught in a web with a female singer who also sang a song on the Scar Winter demo but it has never been released.
Steen: In your music I hear various influences from other bands that I listen to, but the overall style is something new I think. I especially liked the instrumental songs fx. Four Gilders.
Sun Caged (André, The singer): I'm outta here...
(everybody laughs)
Steen : I wondered if you've ever listened to Spastic Ink or Power of Omens, because I especially hear some Spatick Ink influences in there.
Sun Caged (Dennis): Well, Power of Omens is a little too much for me, haha
(Marcel): For me personally, I like to listen to listen to a lot of fusion music and I think it's the same for Rob, so we listen to a lot of fusion and maybe Joost as well, so you can hear that influence of music as well. Four Gilders has this keyboard solo thing that really has fusion, funk and everything in it, so it's really...
Sun Caged (Joost): There's a lot of latino stuff in it actually.
Sun Caged (Marcel): We like to do experiments with that kind of stuff. It's cool when you play an instrumental live song and people are not bored. That is a really difficult thing to do. To play an instrumental song and the singer walks off stage and usually the crowd will be bored after a minute. They will be like "Where is the singer... Please don't do this!"
Sun Caged (Joost): But with us they never do this...
(Everybody laughs)
Steen: (to Marcel) I saw the video on your web site and you do all these funny faces...
Sun Caged (Marcel): (Laughs) Yeah, Well, that's just after having some beers before my webcam and then I just think "Ahh fuck that, let's go" and I do a song and you know, I have this plastic face so I just go around like that. I don't care, I mean it's fun.
Tajs: It fits well into the music somehow.
Sun Caged (Marcel): Yeah, I think so. I also think that a lot of progressive bands are so serious. I mean they are too serious. If you look at Dream Theater live they stand like this on stage, and sometimes they move and the singer moves, but John Petrucci for instance stands like this looking at his guitar and sometimes smiling to the crowd. I like to just make expressions and I just like to have fun, for me the gig is also having a lot of fun and expressing myself. It's not just play the stuff, it's more than that.
Steen: It gives something back to the audience so that's cool
Sun Caged (Dennis): Sometimes people take music a little too seriously. Like when someone makes a little mistake. I used to go to concerts of bands like Dream Theater or a clinic or something and you're standing in the audience and after the song someone is going "Oh he was really out of tune, did you see that second bar in the first break, oh he messed that up".
I really don't give a shit. We're just having fun and someone could walk up to you and say "That one song, the piece at 2:15... rythm 7, 8'th part how did you do that?" To get back to that perfect thing about being live. If you want it perfect, play the CD. No, but it's more about the thing that sometimes some people know more about our music than we do. I mean, just don't overanalyse because it's called intelligent music, we are not that intelligent haha.
Marcel: Most people also think it's based on technique, and that's something I do regret by the way because some people think we really are technicians, because it's technical music. It's not our intention to play as technical as possible. Our attention is to play good songs and write good songs, memorisable songs with good melodies.
Dennis: It's just about what I always compare it to. If you pay more attention in the language class at school you can write a better book than someone who didn't. That's how I compare it. We just put a little more time into knowing what music is all about. That's why we can write songs that have more in them. That's how I see it. You know, you can overanalyse it as much as you want but we don't. We just sit down and play and something comes out. We just play what we feel like. It's not forced, what comes out of us is just natural. We're not going to sit down and make up something we can't even play and make it really difficult. Everything we write comes natural. It's not forced. That's not how it works.
Steen: I know you're going to record your new album in February and you're writing new songs now. Is the new album going to consist of all new songs or are you going to re-record saome of the old ones?
Marcel: I think both, because it's February, so it's pretty fast and I don't think we're going to be able to write a whole new album, but we will have a mix of new stuff and already recorded stuff in a new way. André also rewrote all the vocals for the Dominion songs. Different lyrics and also different vocal lines.
Steen: So, there's no overall theme or concept for the album?
Andre: No, we don't have the time to something like that. It would be cool to do a concept album or something, but not with this timeframe. Maybe with the second album. Not with the budget or time that we get.
Steen: I was wondering, how do you go about composing this, seemingly very complex music?
Marcel: (Laughs) Good choice of words... There is no formula. It kind of depends. Sometimes someone at home just comes up with a riff or a piece and lately Joost and André worked together. They live close to each other so they sit together and write some songs and also André has a lot of ideas. That way it will work and the same I do with Rob sometimes and in the rehearsal room we work alot with Dennis as well.
Dennis: Sometimes I sit down with Marcel or with Rob and just jam, and we come up with a basic riff. Four Gilders actually was mostly written by Rob and we just worked it out.
Rob: Actually at the time we didn't have a vocalist at all and some pieces, mostly tapping and stuff like that was actually written for solo stuff I wanted to do later. But since we didn't have a vocalist and we wanted to write songs, it was like "Oh whatever, just try it man". This was like sixty percent just jamming along with it and now it completely sounds like the band and that's cool.
The same thing about Secrets of flight I finished about 70 percent and I went to Marcel and there were some things I wasn't satisfied about and he came with a lot of new ideas.
Dennis: The cool thing is that whoever writes the song, when it's finished it will always sound like Sun Caged. It doesn't really matter who writes it and that's the cool thing. In my previous band the guitarist would call me up and say "I'm going to go over to the bass player's and we're going to write a song"
I would be totally panicking like "They're going to write something that I don't like"... I would be totally stressed. In this case, if they say "I'm going over to someones place and we're going to work on music" I'm excited, I just know for sure that I'll like it and that's a really nice feeling to know that we're all on the same level. If we just go into rehearsal, everybody will add their own personal style to it. Most bands work like one member is actually the one who writes everything actually, like he's the man in the band, you know he writes everything.
Steen: I noticed on your website that you're playing a show in Holland on the 1'st of January with only Queensr˙che covers.
Dennis: Oh yeah, that's actually the same thing where Marcel and I met at a Pantera gig, new years day 1999. It's a kind of festival that happens once a year and people from all kinds of bands come together and we all do one band. Kate Bush has been done. Everything has been done. I used to play in the festival a lot of times and did Iron Maiden, S.O.D., Pantera, Joe Satriani. Now André also loves Queensr˙che a lot so we were thinking, why not do Queensr˙che?. Joost won't be joining, but we will have a second guitarist. It will be most for fun. The whole theme of the festival is fun. It's January 1'st, so you can't expect a lot (Laughs). Everybody have slept for about two hours or something.
Steen: (To Dennis) I read somewhere that you are arranging a festival, The Headway Festival in Holland next year. When will that happen and could you tell a little about it.
Dennis: April 4'th and 5'th next year. It is basically about the effect that the Progpower festival had. PP was originally set up in Holland and the first edition was very impressive. It was a really impressive venue with some really impressive bands. It's not just about that effect. You have to know which people to get involved. Now they moved the Progpower to a smaller venue and I'm not into the organisation and I don't know why they did it. I just think it could be improved a little as far as location goes and I just try to go with it.
I emailed Rene, the organiser of Progpower about it and at first he was a little pissed, but we decided that it's all about promoting the genre. It's not that I want to compete with him. You know, Progpower in the USA right now. The thing in the USA is that they get really big bands and those bands are way too expensive to get over to Holland in one festival, you have to be a millionaire, I don't know how they do that.
Well, there are a lot of big sponsors and the venue is really big, but there is just no venue in Holland that could do one big festival like that, so that's why I came up with the idea of making two festivals in Holland, so we could spread it a bit more. I think it's this weekend in Atlanta, Progpower USA. I think they have about 15 or 10 bands.
In Holland it's just like... The venue doesn't put money in it. It's all just this one guy. I know it's not that difficult to do, it's not that complicated, but it's a LOT of work. So I just came up with this idea. They say in the States that Prog music is bigger in Europe, but that is not true. The fact is that Europe is smaller and the people are closer to each other and that's why it feels bigger here. I think there are a lot more prog fans in the USA, but they are just more spread out. So I came up with the idea to do another festival here and it's exactly HALF a year after or before Progpower, so we're not in Progpower's way and I conviced Rene that I'm not trying to compete with him.
I'm just trying to help the genre to become bigger, because you are relying on bands that are available and there's just no way that all the bands you want to book are going to be available for that one weekend. That's why I thought that there should be another festival so people have another chance to see more cool bands together at once.
Steen: That sounds pretty cool. Do you have any confirmed bands yet?
Dennis: We have Sun Caged (Everybody laughs). We have Loch Vostock from Sweden, Freak Kitchen, Balance of Power from the States.
But we're talking to a couple of big headliners. The thing is that it's really expensive to get a band over for just one show. If a band is touring it will be a fourth of the price, but if they have to fly over for one show it's really expesnive to book a big name, so we're still talking and comparing prices but it's going to be a really massive amount of work. The whole line up is booked and we only need the two headliners, but I think that within a month we will know.
(The support band has started playing on stage... Some of the sound is really distorted here and I can't hear all of what is being said, but we start discussing the metal scene on Holland)
Marcel: What I especially like about Denmark is that both me and Dennis are big Dizzy Mizz Lizzy fans. Actually Dennis is doing Tim Christiensen's web site also.
Dennis: Tim Christensen actually became one of my best friends. My girlfriend lives in Copenhagen and she lives just around the corner from where Tim lives and every time I'm there, Tim and I go out for beers. I went out on tour with him for a week as his personal assistant or whatever. (Laughs) That was really cool, I was in the hotel with him, and we went all over Denmark in a car.
That was really fun. It's really funny because at first you look up to him because at first he's a musician in a band that you like. Then he becomes a really close friend and you forget about that, bit when I hang with him people walk up to him like he's a superstar and it's really weird. He's really down to earth and he was actually there when we played at TEX. We played Silverflame as the encore. He was in the back just smiling.
When he went there he grew a really big beard. He didn't want to be recognised. He is not a macho kind of guy who wants to go out and be recognised and be a star, he's not like that. When I'm in Denmark he actually just calls me up to hear if I want to go out for a beer.
Steen: Cool, I haven't really listened to his solo stuff. Only on the radio.
Dennis: I love it. It's really pop, but I love it. Stuff you have in the radio here is much better than what we have. You have about 50% crap, we have about 90% crap. It's just like in four hours they play one or two good songs.
Steen: I noticed that you are going to play in Germany the day after tomorrow with Ricochet.
Sun Caged: We don't know them. What kind of music do they play.
Steen: Progressive Metal/Rock. Well, I thought the band was dead and gone, but then I clicked the link on your web site and found out that they have released a new album after six years of silence.
Sun Caged: So the web site is good for something then. (Laughs)
Steen: Well, I think that's pretty much it. do you have any final words to our readers?
Marcel: I just want to say: Visit our web site http://www.suncaged.com and you can follow the information. We will record our new album really soon and we will play some cool stuff over there. Just look at the web site, it will be updated by Dennis our webmaster.
(The band goes into a chorus of Master of Puppets and it's time to turn of the recording equipment :)
We got downstairs and waited to the show to start.
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Written by Steen - 1/4/2003 |
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RevelationZ Comments
| Comment by Matt (Anonymous) - Sunday, January 16, 2005 | Sun Caged is teh kicks ass.
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