This week we have the pleasure of featuring a wonderful group of Danes known as Alcoholic Faith Mission. Over the years the Scandinavian six-piece has booked Sonicgigs like CMJ, SXSW, and Canadian Music Fest. When I found out that they would be playing in Boston as part of their North American tour to promote their newest record Ask Me This, I had to reach out and invite them over for the afternoon.
After recruiting Sonicbids colleague and sound engineer Andy to help me out, we headed over to our friend's Somerville apartment to prepare for what we had dubbed a “porch session.” What resulted was an inspiring performance from the band on two new tracks– “Running With Insanity” and “We Need Fear.” Each time I listen to the recordings I get goosebumps, maybe because it was my first foray into recording live sessions, or most likely because AFM’s songwriting will do that to you.
Take a look at both videos below and read on for an interview that we did AFM members Thorben Seierø Jensen (lead vocals, guitar), Kristine Permild (vocals, percussion) and Morten Hyldahl (drums) after their performance on the porch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OmlUtIdJjWg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=E-CLm-l0LU0
Sonicbids: What is it like taking the new songs from Ask Me This on to the stage? Have you found them to be evolving or changing over the course of the tour?
Kristine Permild: There is a huge difference between the recorded versions and the live versions because I think already when we had to transform our album Let This Be The Last Night We Care we knew that we weren’t able to translate the same sound. Our recorded songs are very layered, tons and tons of layers on top of each other, and we decided that we’re not able to produce the same sound on stage.
Thorben Seierø Jensen: We work on how to create a cool live ambience and atmosphere within the songs. Like Kristine said, we have tons of layers on the recordings, but we try to peel it down and weed out the stuff that is needed for the audio experience, but not necessarily the visual experience.
SB: What do you find is the biggest difficulty when you’re trying to figure out how to take each song and turn it into something that can be performed live?
KP: I think that the toughest thing is that sometimes in a song there’s something, like in “Got Love? Got Shellfish!”, where it’s so driven and it was really difficult to reproduce that song. You’ve got to kill your darlings and explore new good things in the songs, because sometimes the things that you really love about a song are impossible to reproduce live.
SB: What is your favorite song from the new record to play live?
TSJ: My favorite is “I’m Not Evil,” I love to play that song live.
KP: I like “Alaska” and I like “We Need Fear,” that’s a fun song to play.
Morten Hyldahl: We don’t play it that often, but “Throw Us To The Wolves,” I love playing that one a lot.
SB: One of our favorite things about Alcoholic Faith Mission is the music videos that you have made for a lot of your songs. Could you tell us a little bit about the process behind creating all of those videos over the years?
TSJ: We work with a guy named Matthew Thompson, as well as a German director named Bryn Chainey and then we work with a Danish director named Kristian Foldager. They have an idea for one of the songs, they have the imagery in their head and want to follow up on that idea. We give them carte blanche to do whatever they want because we’d like to focus on doing the music and not be all over the place. We like to let other people do what they do best and hopefully we can do what we do best.
KP: We’ve been very lucky, the people that have contacted us have actually made videos that are very picturesque and with beautiful cinematography. I hope this is because our music speaks to the images, because that is why we like making music videos.