Interview : The International Noise Conspiracy

Originally Published on Bedlam Society, October 2002

Living in the shadow of your past successes can be a difficult thing. For the last three years, The International Noise Conspiracy have been trying to shake the stigma of being "the band with the guy from Refused in it". Through hard work and constant touring, they are not only succeeding, but they are playing to the mainstream audience that Refused could never have dreamed of reaching.

Their high energy garage/blues/soul tunes and explosive live shows are exciting audiences all across the globe...and with the support of MTV and other mainstream media outlets, they might very well succeed at bringing socialism to the masses (even if it's only in spirit). Whether you like it or not, the International Noise Conspiracy are fast becoming the biggest band in political rock.

I recently met up with Guitarist Lars Stromberg in Toronto to talk about politics, their new album and the stale old rock n' roll myth.

Bedlam: I hate to start off being contrary, but it says in your bio that you "aim to shake up the very foundation of the bourgeois myth of the rock band", but anyone who's seen your show knows that you are very much a rock band in a lot of ways.

Lars: Oh definitely, but I guess we wouldn't be able to shake up the foundation of that myth if we didn't deal with where the "rock myth" is mostly established…which is at a rock show. I guess what we mean by that is that we want to bring in new elements to the traditional concept of a rock show. There's the whole communication aspect and the whole political aspect. We want to bring in something that people who are used to a traditional rock show aren't really used to. We want to bring the politics into a new context which hopefully can make somewhat of a difference to the sort of stale rock audience. A lot of people just go to shows because it's what they do. They know how to behave and they know what's expected from them as an audience. We want to make people realize that it's as much up to them to entertain themselves as it is up to us to entertain them. Hopefully we can tear down the barriers a little bit.

Bedlam: Is it in any way a kind of satire of the traditional "rock show"?

Lars: To some extent, yeah. I personally can't do like…a rock kick without thinking that it's a bit funny. I don't really take myself all that seriously when I do stuff like that, but at the same time, since I'm used to playing in punk bands I'm just used to sort of going off on stage and putting a lot of energy into it. It's sort of an outlet, but at the same time it's a bit of a parody. There's a lot of little details of things that we do that we just stole from other bands or other people that we use to entertain ourselves.

Bedlam: Where do think you guys fit in to the current "rock scene"?

Lars: Hopefully we can fit in everywhere. We play music that is definitely more accessible to people than what we used to play. All of our previous bands were fast paced punk / hardcore bands and I guess the most noticeable is Denis' old band Refused. That type of music didn't really appeal to a lot of people. You had to be involved in a sort of subculture or clique to appreciate it. Hopefully we can play music that the punks can like, because they see where we're coming from and they see what we're talking about, and we can play music that my dad can like because he sees the traces of rock history. We're not really interested in belonging to a specific scene. We're lucky because we're one of the few bands that can play a punk squat and then play…like a big German mainstream festival the next day. I guess with our punk history we're in a unique position. It seems more interesting than just saying "We're punks so we play to punk kids".

Bedlam: Obviously the idea is to reach as large an audience as possible with your message, but do you think it's possible to achieve a certain level of success without co-opting your original ideals as a band?

Lars: No, not at all. It's impossible to live your socialist ideas if you live in a capitalist society. We've made so many compromises from the day we started out. We started out playing small shows and putting out our own records and that's how we were used to doing it. We were approached by a bunch of labels and we turned them down, but then we realized that to do what we set out to do which was to play music that was more accessible to people, we had to use the channels that were offered to us to reach out to more people. That was definitely a compromise. We had to sort of succumb to a bigger label which happened to be burning heart, which still isn't a big label, but I guess a lot of punk kids would call them a major label. It's all a matter of definition I guess, but we figured that with them we wouldn't have to compromise too much.
We didn't want to go with like…Virgin or Dreamworks because we would have just been swallowed and spat out right away. There are always compromises, but hopefully you don't have to compromise too much of what you believe in because you still want to maintain some honesty in what you do and in the goals you set for yourself. We realize that the ideas that we're talking about are way too important to be kept underground…to be kept a secret. Those ideas should be mainstream. They should be on MTV and in magazines and pretty much everywhere.

Bedlam: Do you find yourself having to defend your politics a lot? Even more so since September?

Lars: Yeah, but how we present ourselves hasn't really changed at all. I guess what we have been given is a chance to use our tools of analysis in a different way than we are used to because of this new situation. Everyone has had to deal with things in a different way. We haven't really had to prove ourselves that much, but we have been given the opportunity to talk about a lot of different things now. I think it's really important that we're not afraid to talk about all of this. We can't be afraid to discuss it and try to figure out why. We can't get caught up in this whole self censorship deal that's happening to a big extent in the states where their taking songs off the radio and taking away all the pictures of the twin towers. It's important that we don't do what's been done so many times in history like try to push it away and bring it into a collective state of forgetting it, like what happened with the Berlin wall. There's not a lot of the Berlin wall left which is pretty sad because it should be there so we can see what it was and so we can discuss it. A lot of the politics that were going on a long time ago in east and west Berlin are still very much in action in east and west Germany because East Germany haven't really been allowed to catch up. The economic structures are still there even though the wall is gone. It seems like they just tore it down so everyone thinks things are good, but they're not. Everything won't get back to normal just because we choose to forget certain cultural objects.

Bedlam: Last time you were here was when the free trade summit was going on in Quebec and you had all kinds of radical literature confiscated at the border. That's something that I would think would never happen in Canada where we have "freedom of speech", but it obviously does happen. What's the level of that kind of censorship in Europe?

Lars: We haven't really had any trouble of that kind in Europe…ever. I think that's because, especially now with the European union and the whole sort of "build a fortress of Europe" idea, if you're inside of that it's very easy to move from point A to point B within that territory. I think if we were a band from further east, like from a country that isn't in the union, and we had those books with us it would have been virtually impossible for us to get in there. It's a lot like it is here at the Canadian / American border. If you're an outsider it's really hard to get across. Within Europe it's easy because they want to create a new superpower to match themselves with the East Asian block and the US. It's going to be really hard for smaller countries that aren't in the union to carry out trade and thing like that. They'll be forced to apply to be part of the union because they can't really exist as an independent state if they don't.

Bedlam: Just to move on to the music for a minute, the new record is a progression from the last album. There are some new elements and styles (like the soul backup vocals). Was that more to keep you guys interested as a band or to keep the music interesting for the audience?

Lars: I think it was a bit of both. We obviously don't want to repeat what we have done already. That's why the 7inch collection sounds different from Survival Sickness which in turn sound different than this new album. The songs sound different and we wanted to present ourselves in sort of a "whole new package" so to speak. It was definitely a conscious effort to change the production and to change the instrumentation and to bring in more influences and more people who could play on it. It was definitely an effort to move away from the previous albums. A lot of it for us is that we don't want to be bored with what we do, but we also want to continue and try to surprise people.

Bedlam: How do the songs come together? Is there a primary person who drives the writing?

Lars: No. We always practice with all of us there. I don't think we've practiced ever without everyone in the band being in the room, which I think is the best way of doing it. Someone comes up with an idea from playing at home, but we take that one little idea (which could be a guitar riff or a bassline or something) and we jam around that for however long it takes to form it into a structure. Everyone in the band utilizes their instruments and for that matter Denis utilizes his voice too. He just sort of plays around with words to see what words will fit in. Then we just sort of sit down and discuss what the song actually should be about. We always do everything together when it comes to songwriting. It's much more interesting to do it that way. I don't think that individually we would be very good songwriters. I think the sum is much stronger than just one individual would be.

Bedlam: Do you find that generally you have a collective vision of what a song should be?
Lars: No, not at all. If you have, say, one bassline you can look at it in a number of different ways. That's where the conflict in songwriting comes about. We all have different visions of what we want. I guess the end product is never really what the vision was. Also we always like to play new stuff live, so we change things a bit for the live version and we change things again for the studio version and so on. We never really reach the final version of a song. In a lot of ways a song is pretty much dead once you've created it. We don't want to keep rehashing the same thing over and over.

Bedlam: How much input does the producer have?

Lars: A LOT.

Bedlam: As far as the overall sound or the actual music?

Lars: A little bit of both. We're fortunate enough to have met a producer with the same sort of vision as us, but with a different way of getting there. A producer is really important because he's the only person that can picture everything as a whole. We're always very surprised when it all comes together. When the song is done and mixed, you finally see what purpose banging a drumstick against a steel wagon or something actually has.

Bedlam: This is your first Canadian date and the Fort Erie / Buffalo border is notorious for giving bands a hard time. Is it generally tough for you guys to get through?

Lars: No, not really. Last time they confiscated those books and they made us go back to the states and ship all our merchandise to the next US show. We were there for like 4 hours. They were just being general assholes about it, but today was pretty easy. They didn't search the van or anything, but we're going back into the states so they still have a lot of time to fuck with us.
It's kind of easy for us because we have all the legit papers so we don't have to fake recording contracts or anything like a lot of bands do.

Bedlam: So you don't have to be like, "We're just going over to shop…or something."

Lars: Yeah....like "Oh there are guitars back there? I didn't even notice."