We had a great trip to Tokyo with Ceremony, we'll be posting photos and video soon, here's a quick interview we just did and some radio info.

From the Kalporz Site

Interview By: Piero Merola

Interview was originally done in English then translated to Italian:

Introduce yourself (meaning and origin of the name)

We are called Screen Vinyl Image and we are from the Virginia/Washington D.C. area of the USA. Our name comes from basically random words put together, we just thought it sounded cool.

Your range of influences includes Dario Argento, Phil Spector, Spacemen 3 and much other stuff. What makes original and interesting your sound? What would you say to people who don't know you. Possibly using less words than my long review

In music we have a history of being part of the shoegaze scene in the US (Skywave, Alcian Blue, Ceremony, A Place To Bury Strangers, December Sound, Ringo Deathstarr, etc) and we also really like some of the older psychedelic/shoegaze groups too (Curve, Slowdive, MBV, Loop, Velvet Underground, Silver Apples, Spaceman 3, etc). But, we also are very heavily influenced by early electronic music from Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream and Giorgio Moroder to some of the Italo scene of the 80’s and the darkwave stuff too. We like working with sequencers and drum machines so old Hip Hop and Electro are also big influences to us.

We are also into watching a lot of movies. We like just about any period of time in film (especially older movies), we try to learn about new genres or periods or movements and with the internet, you can find a lot of incredible movies to watch. But, horror and sci fi are always big favorites to us and they heavily influenced recording Interceptors. The cover was even inspired by Argento’s Suspiria. I’d say there is a very defined line of us loving the beautiful styles of Italian horror/suspense like Argento and Bava to the American styles like John Carpenter, Toby Hooper, and even Rod Serling who did the Twilight Zone.

As I wrote in the review after bands like M83, Ulrich Schnauss, A Sunny Day In Glasgow, A Place To Bury Strangers everybody now is playing more shoegaze than usual. Even in the UK where it seemed to be dead and buried . Do you feel a new shoegaze wave is rising?

That is hard to say. I think I have heard that a new shoegaze wave is rising for years but it never seems to. I think there is more of an appreciation for it now than when we had started Alcian Blue back in the late 90’s but it seems to me that it isn’t music that will suddenly be Top 40 stuff, it will always remain a bit underground, and that is kind of a cool thing. I definitely think that you hear a lot of bands taking what bands like Slowdive and MBV did and pushing it into new sounds and that is really exciting.

You probably play loud, guitars recall jesus and mary chain or curve, but in which way your impact could be considered properly shoegaze? But you sound so suicide and 80s too. Is that your secret?

One thing we always loved about the shoegaze genre was the fact that there were very catchy songs that had massive layers of sound on them. You could listen to Slowdive over and over again and always hear a new part you hadn’t heard before. This has always been a big focus for us too when we record. We like to add lots of layers to give the music dimension. But, our influences don’t just sit with shoegaze which is where some of the Suicide sounds and 80’s and 70’s sounds come in. We didn’t want to just remake an old shoegaze sound, we wanted to have it just be one of the many influences that made up the whole of our sound.

And in terms of being “loud,” we tend to have a reputation for being loud in concert, but we feel like it’s part of the experience we are trying to create for the audience. We make our own visuals and we use lots of strobes on stage and combined with the loud volume, we try to make the audience feel like they can get lost from the world for 30-40 minutes.

You actually came up abroad with a LP. Web is probably killing the long playing recordings. I mean not only the lenght, but  the "aesthetic concept" connecting music and packaging. You listen to thousands bands and it's more and more difficult to pay attention to every single song in the recording. Your multi-dimensional approach to your art with movies references, strobes, sequential circuits, lynch, can and vintage echoes makes you proud of it? is still possible a concept?

That is a very interesting question! We make music because we enjoy making music and if people enjoy what we do then we appreciate that a whole lot. The internet might be killing the long playing records for some people, but I would still bet there are a lot of people in the world who still appreciate lying down on their bed, putting their headphones on, and getting lost in a record. You get to experience a view into what makes up an artist and if you enjoy the music then it becomes a part of your life too. You don't get that same experience by just listening to a bunch of songs by a bunch of different artists all the time.

What about Safranin Sound collective? You feel this community model for labels is spreading elsewhere?

This model has been around for a while. It all kind of started up because most of us were all close by to each other. (Alcian Blue, Skywave, Ceremony, Screen Vinyl Image, The Offering, The Antiques) And we met some other bands like The Vera Violets who are from Florida, The Vandelles from NYC and SafeAshome from Paris. It’s a very small thing, but we’ll help each other out with promotion, shows, design, etc. And everyone knows different bands and artists so you get to meet lots of other people into the same thing you are this way.

Except for your new notable fellow citizen, is there something new in Washington dc? I mean the new art/music scene like in Baltimore where many artists are coming up.

There are a lot of different music scenes in DC. You have great DJ’s, great different genres of music from experimental scenes to more pop type ones, and of course we have lots of world music too. We practice at a great studio that has a lot of bands who do Reggae/Dub/R&B stuff and who have a lot of history in the cities music scene. And of course this applies to art as well. We like playing in Baltimore a lot too, especially at this place called the Metro Gallery which is an art gallery and music venue. We tend to meet a lot of people in both cities each time we play here, though we try to play out of town as much as possible too.

Talking about your gigs, how you going? I watched some vids on youtube, very impressive and powerful. You play everywhere in the US and you're flying to Japan. Are you ready? What about Europe?

The gigs have been amazing! We have been touring pretty strong since March after Interceptors came out. We’ve been very busy planning for Japan with Ceremony and Eskimohunter, it’s exciting to go to Tokyo for the first time. We have been doing some talks about Europe in 2010 too with some people in Germany and the UK. We would love to come to Italy too if we could!

We tour with our own PA system on top of our amps. And we tour with a ton of strobe lights and visuals. It’s a lot of planning and a lot of equipment to haul, but we have a very focused idea on how we want to sound and what we want the audience to experience. After Japan we will be taking a long winter break to record. We have some demos and have ideas for new songs that we want to start getting on tape.

Three 2009 albums everybody should have and some new bands from the US nobody probably knows here who deserve a listen.

Wow, um, the new A Place to Bury Strangers is amazing. It comes out on Tuesday Oct 6 but we have listened to it and I think people are going to be very excited about it! And also the new Ceremony album is coming out and that is also going to be a must have too. And we just did a tour with The Sky Drops who just released their debut full length and it is just a fantastic album. You can pop it on at home but it also makes for a great driving record.

I know Soundpool has a finished full length which is our most fave stuff of theirs yet so definitely keep an eye out. And a number of others. Like Telltale, Thrushes, The Water, Ringo Deathstarr, and Dead Leaf Echo. I could go on and on, but there is a lot of bands out that are great and all getting ready to release albums! It will be a good next few months.

This decade is coming to an end. About arts generally worse than 1990s and 1980?
Your favourite 2000s recording and movie.

Movies aren’t really the same. Some people are still making great movies, but it seems like there was a point in the late 90’s and early 2000’s where the formula to make money overtook the formula of making something artistic. But even with the onslaught of media we are exposed to now, there are still a lot of people making very beautiful things, you just have to search for it in a different way than you did before..

But, uh, favorites. Hmm.  I’ll go with stuff I have most recently watched movies that are from the 2000’s: Cecil B Demented and Coroline. For albums probably Ulrich Schnauss’s “A Strangely Isolated Place” and Ladytron’s “Witching Hour.”

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In Radio news, Cathode Ray was featured on NPR as the Song of the Day which was cool news to get while we were in Tokyo.

Also, Lost in Repeat was spun this week on Rude 66's weekly show Cosmic Overdrive on the Intergalactic FM site which was also very exciting news as we are big fans of Rude 66's music.