While at Culture Collide in Los Angeles a week or so ago, I caught up with Netherlands based group Moss to talk about what it’s like coming to America, their chances of touring Australia, Islands, Bollywood films and much much more, over a few sodas at a cafe in Silverlake…
Welcome to Los Angeles! It’s your first time here, how have the experiences gone so far… you’ve played a couple of shows at Culture Collide already.
Definitely yeah, it was nice, it was cool. We played at a really nice, big venue, the Echoplex, which was a really cool place, nice place. We played at a little restaurant but they had a good set up so it was cool. And we’ve been driving around the city a lot; we’re really enjoying it.
Eating burritos?
Eating burritos until we drop.
So you’re here promoting your third record but it has been out for a little while now. So what have you been up to this year, has it all been touring? I know you played some festivals over the summer?
Yeah mostly in Holland. We started with a club tour but only in the Netherlands. We also did the biggest festivals in the Netherlands. Now these months I think, especially October, for us it’s going International. We’ve been to New York now and Los Angeles. We go to Iceland and France, and then we do the Netherlands again with the Fall tour. It’s basic, for us it’s basic- playing every week. We go to Iceland Airwaves on the 2nd of November, we’re playing two shows there.
Have you played Reykjavik before?
No, we’re very enthusiastic to go there. First of all because it’s a really nice festival with a really good name, so that’s great, and also I’m really curious to see the island. I love travelling.
I know pretty much every band that goes there, they end up getting a photo for a future album in there with all the black rocks.
Yeah (laughs), no trees. I think we we’re going to stay three extra days just to look around a bit, to see the whole country. Well not the whole country but a part of it. I hope we can, I hope it’s not too cold or too dark or whatever. Probably both.
Well you released your third album at the beginning of the year, how have you found the reception to be so far for it? You’ve been touring it around relentlessly as we we’re talking about.
The album reception has been very good. Very positive reviews and also the reactions we get direct from people around us and from other musicians, they’re all very positive about it. And also playing wise, it’s going well, in the end it didn’t really have a single-single, which is a shame because of course that would have helped push the promotion. But I’m not surprised about it, when we we’re finished I sought of thought ‘Nah, it’s not a singles album’. It’s not something that really took off. It was played, we had some good airplay and there were 2 songs released as a single but in the end it didn’t gather momentum.
But we did really well with the album before and we’re definitely building on that. It wasn’t really a problem in the end, the turnout at shows were good. We’re very happy we made this album, I think it’s very good. But it wasn’t a surprise that it didn’t have that sort of success.
I met a couple of people who were at your show last night who were from the industry in America and they’ve been following you guys for quite a long time. What has that push been like on the International front? Has there been much movement or is it very slow? I imagine it’s like Australia where it’s very hard to get out of your own country.
In the Netherlands we have this foundation and we can practically make a living out of that. And everything we do outside of the Netherlands feels like a bonus, like a huge bonus. It’s like ‘ok, you’re going to America- great! Let’s go to America.’ If someone’s going to pick that up, of course we’ll go there. We love to play shows, and we love to play here.
I think things should move when things are happening. I love the fact that you can move wherever things move you to, and now it’s moved us here, maybe there’s a booking agent or a label that thinks ‘Oh ok, let’s check it out, or release the album’ or whatever. We’ll continue on making records anyway. That’s the way we think about music. We don’t really have set goals to release an album in every country we love. (Waiter interrupts) What was the question again?
I’ve already forgotten it (laughs). We were talking about the international front. But I mean, you do sing in English, so there must be that-
We’re really happy we could play here, but actually of all the international showcases we’ve been doing over the last couple of years, especially when we’re playing here, and when we played in New York and Culture Collide, we’re not focusing on a big breakthrough in America. And that’s not the reason we’re singing in English, singing in English is only because it sounds better than singing in Dutch.
The fact is, we play more shows like this, these showcase festivals, we played them in the UK, we did Great Escape, and because of that we go to Iceland now, you know? And when we’re in Iceland maybe something else will happen. It’s always that if you start something, something will happen eventually. It’s the same here, we were asked last year to come over here, but we couldn’t, we had some other gigs, but then eventually something will happen.
And hopefully we get you down to Australia at some point!
That would be great, We’d love to, definitely.
Have you had a release of your albums in Australia, or just through iTunes?
No, nothing. Just through iTunes. We’ve been talking about releasing there, the thing is that, I don’t know if it’s much use if you cannot follow it up with promotion and playing and stuff like that. We made a decision to first see if we could expand into Germany and France, stuff that’s close to us, where we have direct connections through our record company. And we can work at it because we can go there, we can play there. With a small investment you can reach a lot of people – we did tours in Germany and we played like 5 shows in small clubs… little bit of money to go there. To come here, or to Australia, it costs a tonne of money. There has to be a way to follow it up with something to make it worthwhile.
Now looking forward to 2013, are you working on any new material?
Yeah, we’re actually going to start next month, just start gathering all the new ideas and see what’s there. And for me, Los Angeles and New York have inspired me a lot to write new music, so that will help. We’re going back to the island where we recorded our third album, it’s in the north of the Netherlands. I’m looking forward to 2013, to start recording again.
It’s on its own island? What’s the story there?
Well, it’s not with palm trees and there’s no hula-bikini girls. The first thing was that we didn’t want to be in a studio. The clock ticks and you have to pay for every day you’re there. So now we’ve got this setup we can bring and we can go practically anywhere. And there was this large building on that island, it’s like in the middle of a, I don’t know, like a camping site? But in off-season there were no people so we could use everything we wanted. It’s great- great space with a screen and a projector and every night we’d watch movies from our laptop. We had some good times there writing songs and recording I think 25 per cent of the album. That was the starting point of our latest album.
Any particular films which inspired the music you were writing at the time?
Good question, because yes, they do inspire you. Jasper was talking about this Bollywood movie, saying ‘we should watch that movie’ and honestly I don’t like movies where people are singing and dancing, but it was a great movie we watched it, the whole three hours.
They’re epic, aren’t they, those Bollywood films?
Yeah! Especially this one, this one was definitely an epic, and it was great and that way it would inspire you for the next day. And an island is always something special; you have to take a boat and this boat would take an hour to get there, you’re away from it all, you feel remote, but it’s a good feeling, it’s liberating not getting distracted by everyday life, it’s great.
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Find out more about the band here: http://www.mosstheband.com
Transcript by James Holmes.
