Prog-Nose

I met Gazpacho during The Night of the Prog (The Loreley Festival) and had a spontaneous interview with them. They asked me to publish it now, because they are performing at The Spirit of 66 in Verviers as headliner of the first day of the Progrésiste Festival.

I never interviewed you before, so let’s start with the name, Gazpacho?
Jan: Gazpacho is cold soup. It’s a contradiction in terms. When we didn’t have a band name, we thought that people, who had a full day time job and only did this as a hobby (and we have very, very different jobs as well) and who have different music interests, needed this kind of name, with a contradiction in it. Gazpacho is cold soup. In Norway, Soup is supposed to be warm, so… And it needs a lot of different ingredients to make a good Gazpacho.
Thomas: There’s tomatoes, onions, celery, cucumbers and wodka if you’re very lucky.

I got to know Gazpacho, because you were one of the pioneers in giving free downloads of your songs
Jon-Arne: Yes, we have a members area on our site and as long as you tell us who you are and sign on to the newsletter, you receive a user name and password. So you can log on and download our music. And you can stream the whole albums.
Doesn’t that diminish your sales?
Jan: We don’t know.
Thomas: If no one has ever heard of you, then no one is going to buy your albums. If no one knows your music, no one is going to be interested in you. So we had to find a way to get people to listen to our stuff. With no record contracts and no possibility to get anything played on the radio, the only way to get something out, is to give away something for free.
Jan: A lot of people, who download it, think they don’t have to buy it, because they have a copy, but in our case, thousands of people have downloaded it and discovered us through the web and bought our albums. There was a guy coming to me, from Brazil who came to this festival because we are playing here. And I met lots of people today, who know us from MySpace.


Are you well known in Norway?
Jan: No, not really. We are better known in the prog circuit in Holland, Germany, Italy and France. France is a big country for us as well. But Holland is the biggest for us.
Thomas: Although that’s the problem with the downloading, you don’t really know where you’re big and where you’re small. And that’s very difficult when you are touring.
You don’t have any idea if you will play for 2 people or for 100 or 1000.
And this Loreley festival is a big one.
Thomas: Yes, it is
Yet, although it’s a big festival loaded with big names, there’s not that many people.
Jan: It’s not easy to get there. Had it been in Köln or Berlin where it’s easy to fly in or get by train, there would have been a lot bigger audience. The site, the location is perfect but you almost can not get here. There aren’t that many Norwegians or Swedes here, for instance. You have to get a plane to Frankfurt and then a bus or something?

So, you’re touring after the summer? Coming to Belgium?
Jan: Yes, we are playing in Verviers on October 18. And then we will finish the new album, which should be ready by Christmas. The plan, the hope and the prospect is to release it late spring, early summer.
It will be an own release again? No label
Jan: No label. We have full time jobs and we are doing everything ourselves. Recording, mastering and all the rest.
Jon-Arne: We are helped by a lot of friends. We call them our family. They helped us out in Holland, Germany and Norway.
Jan: And now the Italians are helping to get us to Rome. It’s something like: “my brother owns a club and they are playing progrock”.
Jon-Arne: We have to do this ourselves. We don’t have a promoter.
Jan: You need a booker to do it properly and a tour manager and he has got to be paid. There’s no economy in it. We played in Köln yesterday in a very small place and we played break even.

Even without any professional help, you get to tour with Marillion.
Jan: We got invited by Marillion, because they like our music. Steven Rothery asked us to play a solo on our album “Firebird”. And of course we said no, hahaha. So we sent him the files and he played the solo and send it back to us.

Are your albums concepts?
Jan: The last one is, but the first three weren’t.
Jon-Arne: There a general theme on “Firebird”, but there’s no concept.
And what’s “Night” about?
Jan: It’s about the dream, about the place between the conscious and the unconscious you. When you’re going to sleep, it’s still your brain which is making that up or processing that data or whatever a dream really is. I think it’s getting order in the file cabinet in your head.
Jon-Arne: There are five stages of dream, so we have five tracks on the album.
Jan: It’s something we all felt, which makes it easy to write about. So it’s about the irrationality of dreaming.


Is the next album a concept? I heard the new track “Tick Tock” in your set.
Jan: We are still debating whether it’s going to be a concept or not, but it will be about time. About different ways of travelling and how time seems to us during that journey.
Thomas: We want to make albums that are like soundtracks. If you listen to “Night”, it’s about you and we want to do the same with “Tick Tock”. It still will be you. Which memories are triggered in you by certain images; your perception of time; how does it feel,… It’s difficult to explain, but we are trying to something along this line.
Jan: We always compose and record, especially compose when we make the demos and the sketches. We make it layer by layer. Thomas can talk about that for an hour, being the producer.
Thomas: We make the music first, then the lyrics and we try to see what the song wants and what’s it about and then we try to get the lyrics to fit the music. It just makes itself.
Jon-Arne: Usually we have the music first and then the lyrics and then we record before we rehearse live. Now we are actually playing the song live because we found out that the more you play it live, the better it becomes. So we record it afterwards.

Isn’t it a problem that the audience doesn’t know the new pieces?
Thomas: We don’t have any problems with that because we are Gazpacho and most of the people don’t know our music anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. ;-)
Jan: it’s really fun, because of the Internet. Internet has no boundaries. The whole front row today, were singing along with our songs, so they know the lyrics.

I heard you mention something about a Spanish painter who did the artwork?
Jan: Antonio Seijas Cruz, he did all the artwork for “Night”. He’s a great painter and he also painted the cover of the coming Marillion album. Which is really funny because they had us as support band and they saw our cover and then they nicked our painter. ;-)

Thanks for the interview and I hope to see you in Belgium during your tour
Jan: We will be there and I hope you and your Belgian audience will too. Thanks.