southern records

John Kaada is a 29 year old Norwegian musician. His debut solo album, the sympathetically titled "Thank You For Giving Me Your Valuable Time", got plenty of the right kind of attention. Enjoying an international release on Ipecac last year, it found it's way onto «year best of» polls in countries ranging from the USA to Portugal. An album of unusually accomplished cut'n'paste collages taking it's cues from a variety of black American music, the record was nothing like KAADA had been doing up to that point. Indeed, it's nothing like what he's been doing from then up until now, either.

Since the release of the 'Valuable' album, KAADA has been working on numerous different projects. He has released two albums. One with his splatter-trio Cloroform titled "Hey You Let's Kiss", and a solo pop album called "MECD" released on Warner. He's also done a ton of film music and toured around Europe with his bands. John's most recent and some would argue accomplished project is a collaboration with Mike Patton entitled 'Romances'.

Doris: How did you meet M.Patton and Ipecac?

John: My band, since childhood, is called Cloroform. Its a aggressive hardrock band, but the instrumentation is kind of strange. Mike Patton was very fond of this band, and wanted me to send over the Cloroform albums. He didn't really feel like releasing any of these on ipecac, but kept asking me to send him some more stuff. This was in 2001, and I had this bedroomstudio-project going on, which I had never really presented to anybody. Greg, Mike and the other people at ipecac loved it, and it later became my first album on Ipecac.

D: When and how did you decide to make a record together?

J: I don't really remember exactly when we started. But I think it was about two and a half years ago that I presented him with some stuff that I hoped could turn into the next KAADA-album. It was only some vague ideas, but with a pretty clear thoughts of a sound-universe. He immediately joined in. It was supposed to be an album based in the late romanticism, but performed with our sounds. A slow-moving large piece, consisting of nine pieces, almost like a symphony. There are a lot of classical music history buried in this album, but I believe, or I at least hope, that we haven't made something that will be called a "crossover" album between classical and rock. There has been too many bad attempts to do this through the last 35 years.

D: How did you work together? Do you still live in Norway ? How long did it take?

J: The cooperation with the album started for real when the KAADABAND joined in on the Ipecac-geek tour summer2003. We traveled around Europe, and had some time off to develop the direction of the album. The first vocal-takes were done hotel rooms. Since then, we've been sending cds to each other every month. It has been a long process for both of us to finish up this album. In January 2004, I thought we were all done. I was so tired of mixing and working on the music. Not in the sense that I was tired of the composition, but more in a technical way. This isn't music where, you know..., you have one bass track, a snare drumtrack etc... This is a complex and colorful sound universe, with tons of different instruments. So it was difficult to get them all together, and to get a nice flow in the music.... Anyway, I sent a cd over in January 2004, thinking that I was done. A week later I got a 16 pages email back, with hundreds of details that Mike wanted me to fix. I worked my ass off for two weeks, and sent over a new cd, thinking it just couldn't get any better now. wrong. We kept on like this for eight months. Mike also did lots of additional percussion, samples, piano and vocals in this period, and I did some re-recordings. In August, it felt like I had worked on the album for eights months overtime. I promised myself that after that album, I would only record mono-guitar pieces, with ONE mic, one track. Not music with hundreds of tracks and instruments. We both had very strong opinions about how the Romances should sound, so that didn't make it any easier. Now that we are all done, I am, off course, very happy that we didn't wrap it up in January. The album got so much better through those last months.

D: Why did you choose to name "Romances" and the references to french musique and language for the song titles?

J: The titles are stolen from old pieces from that period. We collected a lot of title-suggestions, but ended up with putting them all in french. We liked the sound of it, and think it fits nicely into the romances-universe. The word "Romances" is what they often called a collection of songs in those days.

D: Who did what?

J: I was in charge of most of the technical stuff, like recording the additional musicians, but we both composed just as much. We both play different instruments and sing on most of the tunes, Patton did the lyrics on track2 and track7. The contributions on the album, all in all, are about 50% Mike and 50% me.

D: Any chance to hear Romances performed live?

J: It's only a question about scheduling and economics. The band we've put together for this project is an 8 piece orchestra. In other words, there are lots of people involved. We certainly hope that we'll be able to come.

D: Any chance of another collaboraton with MP?

J: We've started doing some soundexperiments and stuff, but it is to early to tell if this will ever turn into a new album, or anything at all.