SonicMonks

Most people who attended Plink Plonk festival should know the name I Love Sarah. And probably most of those people fell in love with them, cause it was just too crazy and lovely to leave you cold hearted. Well at least we fell in love with this Belgium band and decided to do a little e-mail interview with them. It was so great of Jani Jani (the crazy drummer) to actually reply and with such a great answers. So here you are:


First of all we would really like to know, how did it all began. How did you two meet and what made you make music together?
We actually met through a classified ad on a website. Rutger was looking for a drummer for his band and I was desperately looking for a band to drum in. We were 14-15-16 or something so we didn't really care that the band sucked ASS but focussed on having a good time and secretly drinking low quality cocktails. We started a better band without the singer (a woman) later and that band was better. When that band stopped Rutger and I decided to only be a duo from now on. We also changed our names from Rutger to Rudy (Perdu) and Jeroen to Jani (Jani). WOOH!

What inspires your music?
I for one was (and am) very much inspired by the drumming of the drummers from Mastodon, Deerhoof and a guy I saw playing in New York last year called Kevin Shea. I don't know if Rudy is specifically inspired by any guitarists, I do know his style is quite unique as he is a self-taught and talented young man. Generally we are inspired by all the good music we hear, this is basically any music that isn't boring. Funny, when some Chinese woman from France (French woman from China?) asked us what music we liked she wouldn't write down stuff like Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé because that wasn't good for her "street credibility". TOUGH SHIT, THEY ROCK.

How does the creative process look like? Do you just jam together until something good comes out or do you work separately or somehow else?
Rudy mostly comes up with new ideas. These days they are often rough drafts, beginnings of songs. We jam around some loops and then try to add some non-loopy stuff to keep it interesting if necessary. We rarely "just" jam without any particular ideas to start with. I also bring up new ideas sometimes. But the finished song is always the product of the two of us working together. We take rehearsing quite seriously, we don't do it a lot but when we do there's no drinking and not a lot of talking, just playing. We need to work on some new material though!

You gave a pretty impressive and emotional concert in Estonia. It all seemed impulsive and fresh and made us wonder, how much improvisation there is in your live performances?
Thank you very much. We have most of the songs down pretty well by now so they do involve quite some improvisation sometimes. But we know WHERE there is room to do so. You can't just go around being interesting and creative when you're looping because when it sucks the shit keeps repeating! So I would say the big structures are quite strict but we fill it in differently each concert.

Has making of this band improved your life somehow? If yes, then how?
We went to Estonia and saw a lot of beautiful women! It is also so much fun when people clap and cheer at you, if that doesn't improve your life you're an ingrateful boring bastard! It's also good to play gigs because it's a lot of fun, it feeds your ego (well at least mine!) and your stomach! Especially when my girlfriend isn't around I get really lazy about food so it's great when you can go play somewhere and they treat you nice. And there's the free beer but since I got my driver's license there will be less of that I'm afraid!

What kind of music to you listen to yourself?
We normally answer this question by telling a band one by one (first Rudy then me and so on). But Rudy isn't here so I will sum up some stuff: commercial stuff that's well made (Justin, Beyoncé, ...), but also things like Animal Collective, good metal like Mastodon, noisier stuff, heavy rock etc. I know Rudy just bought the new TV On The Radio and likes it! We bought DON'T like postrock. We both like Adam Green and the Liars a lot. At the moment I'm really into this Dutch hiphop band called Opgezwolle. My all-time favourites include the Beach Boys, Beck, Grandaddy, Ween, Walkmen, ... Rudy likes most of that stuff as well. Ooh and Shining! A genius band from Finland. A lot of stuff really, we're constantly listening to everything!

As we don't have any idea about Belgium's music scene, we wondered how popular are you in Belgium? How do people in your country react to your music?
For a band that doesn't have an official record out and are quite underground, we're relatively popular. Most of the time we have people showing up at the concerts and we've been lucky with some great opportunities as well. We're quite proud to have played on of our first gigs in the entrance hall of the Ancienne Belgique, the most important "alternative" music hall of Belgium and the day after Plink Plonk we played at the third biggest alternative festival! That was brilliant because we were the first band, it was the last day of the festival so we didn't expect a lot of people to be there already in the morning. But there were a lot and they were super enthousiastic! I like the way people react to our music, sometimes crazy, sometimes crazier!

Are there any other great bands in Belgium besides I Love Sarah? Can you recommend any?
No!



Just kidding, there are a LOT of brilliant bands here. Where to start... The mastermind is Mauro Pawlowski definitely. He has 16968476 musical alter egos and all are recommended to check out. Start here: http://www.mauroworld.com. I also like Elko Blijweert, he's the best guitarist of the world and plays in some great bands. The best of these is Franco Saint De Bakker, a 9-piece that play rock and pop and jazz and tv tunes! So many good bands, let me just randomly name some great ones: Dead Man Ray, Sukilove, Mitsoobishy Jacson, El Guapo Stunt Team, 't Hof Van Commerce, Tip Toe Topic, and I'm obviously forgetting millions. Ooh and some advertisement for the bands I play in: Sjoerd ( http://www.myspace.com/sjoerdmusic ), Benny Zen ( http://www.myspace.com/bennyzen ) and I H8 Camera ( http://www.myspace.com/ih8camera ). Rudy's other band is called 7 Laws Of Woo ( http://www.7low.com/ )!

What has been the worst live for I Love Sarah?
Ooh let me think! Ok, I just looked through our gig history and there hasn't really been a "worst". Surely, sometimes we played shitty and sometimes the audience was bored (or both!) but most of the time we still had fun. A good one to mention is Stabroek Rockt though. A huge stage with only 10 old people expecting a pop/rock cover band! We first fucked up some of our own songs and then played an extremely loud and noisy rendition of Sun Ra's "Rocket Number Nine". The people turned down the monitors and PA and we were asked to leave. The cover was GREAT though, too bad it didn't get recorded - probably the best cover we've ever played, we didn't dare play it again afterwards. And we haven't. We also got paid with a hamburger so I'm not sure if it was the worst...

Don't you sometimes feel that two people is not enough for a band or that you need more people to play the instruments?
We don't! I mean, don't you sometimes feel you should have nine girlfriends instead of one? I sure do but sometimes it just doesn't work like that. We can play loud music thanks to the Loopstation and that's all that matters. We can also put a lot of different instruments and layers on a lot of tracks when we're recording in the studio, so we're not frustrated (yet)!

Are you doing anything else besides music? Do you work, study or have some strange hobbies?
I don't really, I just play music and listen to music and study music but also watch a LOT of films. I like all genres except for costume dramas. Rudy has finished studying film so he's making a lot of shorts and doing commercials and video clips. He's an up and coming young director of photography! I don't know if he has hobbies though.

How would you categorize I Love Sarah? In what kind of genre it belongs to?
Three genres: postpop, muzaknoise and supermarket love boat mathrock trash penis

Who is Sarah anyway?
There are two Sarahs. One of them used to be Rudy's girlfriend but is now dating a German (A GERMAN!). The other one is my girlfriend and she's the greatest girl in the world obviously!

When can we get more mp3s? Or are you planning to release a full album someday soon? Really looking forward to it:)
I should really put our first demo mpthrees online on my web label, My Winkle Records ( http://www.mywinkle.tk ). I'll do it in August, promised! This month we're also planning on releasing a live cd-r and when that happens you can be sure I'll put some of those tracks available for free download as well of course. In November we will probably start recording our first "proper" ep or album. Our dream is to release it on vinyl because vinyl is better than cd. This will make it more difficult to make mpthrees but I'm sure I'll manage! I don't think anything proper will be released before 2007 though...