What do you hope to achieve with Maninblack?
Maninblack is psychotherapy for my warped creative process. Some people hear voices in their heads while my voices are accompanied by guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, backing vocals, a producer, a sound engineer, a manipulative manager, a major label deal and international tour with the most outrageous perks imaginable, etc., etc. It was when my voices also demanded unusual contractual agreements that I realized I had a problem. Seriously, the time I spent between my last serious music project many years ago and Maninblack was fraught with multi track cranial inspiration, much of which became demos for Maninblack material. The catchy songs that I'm unable to get out of my head are invariably my own creation. After the successful, albeit temporary, treatment of my condition I'm looking at the initial production stages of Maninblack's first full length CD, and possibly some video productions to follow up. After all this is completed I plan on retreating once again into! My thought gulag for a brief period to refresh my creative process. Yeah, I know, it's a vicious circle and I'm actually feeding into as I go along. Long term goals are to get some sort of deal which will allow me to spend more time producing rather than working a real job to finance my projects.
 Eamon Cronin |
What obstacles do you find get in the way of the band? Or of the band's progression? The main obstacle experienced by Maninblack, since its inception two years ago, has been the other members. I realize that it's not a easy task to find reliable musicians who also happen to be equally contributing members. For Maninblack, membership problems have been unusually prevalent to the point where they were dubbed "the "Maninblack curse" early on and, considering that on a few occasion we've been offered some minor breaks by music industry people but were unable to uphold our end of the deal due to a lack of commitment by other members, it takes on the character of an absurd cosmic joke. In fact at this exact point in the space/time continuum Maninblack is experiencing just that. All in all I spend inordinately more time looking for competent and compatible musicians than I do in the production of song material. Are there different things that get in the way of touring? The main thing that gets in the way of a Maninblack tour at this time is actually having a tour to set out on although |
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How did you hook up with Garry Bushell? When Maninblack launched its web site (here) about a year ago I contacted everyone connected with the Oi scene who had an eMail address to announce the site. Bushell (here) was the only one who got back to me. And not to diminish this event, to be sure, I had been a fan of his band The Gonads (here) when I was a kid, them very possibly being the first Oi band I had ever heard, and Bushell had been a more than instrumental in starting the Oi scene having produced, managed, and directly participating in (under various pseudonyms) many of the early Oi bands. I was definitely exited to hear from Bushell and over the course of several months we started working on some projects together including our "Bushell Of Oi!" compilation, promotion and production work on a few different tribute compilations, some multi media projects that we have in the works, and my induction into his band The Gonads. What kind of priority rating is given to the making of Cd Covers/posters and other images used to promote the band? I spend a lot of time promoting Maninblack on the internet myself and with the help of an assistant, Sally Hand of Shock Promotions, Ltd, who has also promotes several projects and bands that Maninblack has worked with and some of Garry Bushell's personal projects. In the course of a few months we was able to get Maninblack's name and a link back to Maninblack's web site on a few hundred music related web portholes and links pages. Many of these pages feature images, as well as MP3s and biographical information, of the bands they are linking to. |
 Raul Navarro |
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Being independent, how important do you think it is to be aggressive in pushing C.D and concert sales? I think that to succeed, or at least maintain a comfortable working level, you have to be every bit as aggressive as the major labels are although as an independent artist that doesn't leave a lot of time nd energy to be creative. And it's not so much the sale itself but what good sales generate like exposure and reputation. There's a big difference between being able to sell 500 CDs throughout 10 different countries than selling the same amount to your friends and local fan base. The actual sale itself is roughly the same but down the line that's an average of 50 people in 10 different countries who are potentially spreading the word about your band as opposed to 500 people who are connect regionally. How is songwriting handled? What's the procedure of it? So far I am writing all that material for Maninblack although I won't dismiss the idea of working along with someone else in the future. My procedure for song writing, which I hint at above, has usually been idea based where I get certain concepts in my mind, many times visual, and I form melodies and rhymes around them which I turn into music and lyrics. I spend a lot more time putting together the bits and pieces of my songs in my head than I do writing them down and recording them. When I'm finished writing a song I have a pretty complete idea of how the the song should sound including the other instruments and, now that I am recording demos of my songs before I present them to other band members, my creative process is left more intact. The addition of my Macintosh computers, and more recently a Roland GR-33 guitar synthesizer and Bias Deck multi track recording software, |
 Andre Schlesinger |
Do you have any favourite local bands, zines or venues?
I'm not much for going to shows or even listening to other bands and for the most part I'm not much of a music consumer having only bought The Gonads "Schitz-Oi!-Phrenia " CD in the past year so I could learn the songs. From what I've heard so far from people here in New York City claiming to do something similar to me I'm not very impressed. Oi music in itself has be very misunderstood from the beginning and it would seem that a lot of the people claiming to be a part of it are misunderstanding it as well. A up and coming band and zine that I like, although not local, are The Bolsheviks