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Room 101

Get out your trash, it's recycle time! This week the Dutch rockers Room 101 are one of the 300 bands featured in the showcase festival of European Music Conference A2A. Therefore, KindaMuzik sent out its Vice President of Trash Collection to get the latest on Room101's recycle-rock...

Publicatiedatum: 17 oktober 2001

Room 101 has been around for a few years now, what's your history?
"We started out eleven years ago as a death metal band. At that time the band concisted out of five persons. About six years ago there were only three bandmembers left, us three. So there was more room to implement experiment and our own personal taste into the music we were playing. This resulted in a big change for us, no more metal! Now we play recycle-rock, as we call it."

You just mentioned the word recycle-rock, how would you describe that concept?
"When we rehearse we just jam, we record the stuff we play and edit it later into compositions that might become songs later. So we recycle our own music. After we cut and paste the bits we recorded we try to play that composition so a new song will come out of it. We are not stuck to just one style of music we just use sounds that we think will fit the song. So there are influences from jazz, metal, rock, but also electronics and just weird noises. Lately we are more and more adding elctronics, this is the result of a project we did with a DJ. We composed the music for a fashionshow and played it live together with a dj. We also did a project with a hiphop crew a few years ago, that really rocked!"

Your music is very eclectic, I can hear a lot of influences and think your music comes straight from of the street. What are bands that influenced you to play this sound?
"One of the reasons why our music is so eclectic is that we all like a lot of different styles, for instance even tango, fusion jazz, punk, rap and deathmetal. Bands that really encouridged us to play our music and that we really like are bands like Motorpsycho, Sonic Youth and everything on the Constallation label. One Room101 tip: check out the first record by a band called the Monsters, Spirit of Ibah. Also the Dutch band The Ex is a band we highly recommend."

Who came up with the band name? "When we started, eleven years ago, we used a different name, but it didn't stand for a long time. At that time we were finishing secundary school and had to read the book "1984" by George Orwell. In that book there is a "Room 101" were people get confronted with their greatest fears. Since we weren't such a good players at that time we thought that was a suitable name."

Since you've been playing live for so many years you must have played some strange venues?
"Yeah, once we did a show in the North of Holland that we all remember very well. We played in Simplon in Groningen one night and after the gig a bus came to pick us up and bring us to Oude Pekela, a small town near Groningen. Underway we saw nothing but plain grassfields and out of the night this concrete block doomed. That was the venue for the next night! A clean white hall, with lots of lightbars and white tyles on the floor. Our host was already waiting for us, this was in the middle of the night and we were very tired, and he made us some meatballs with bread. We ended up eating meatballs and croque monsieurs and drinking beer untill the morning. Than we had to sleep on the tile floor. Not really a great way to prepare for a gig, but a great gig it was. Local kids ended up mooning the audience on stage and later there was a small riot and someones car got smashed. This in a town were about 500 people live! That night we played a great jam on stage and we called it Oude Pekela. This was one of the weirdest things that happened to use during a gig. One of the weirdest places we played must have been a swimmingpool were we got payed to stop playing!"

You also have a website, what's the relation between the net and your music?
"We have our own site, room101.nl We try to keep our fans informed about all news concerning Room 101. About every two weeks 4 tracks are added to the download section. One completely new song, one golden oldie, one not so golden oldie and a jam taken from rehearsals. We use our site for our special project called "compile your own Room 101 cd", you can buy a recordable cd from us and than you can put all the tracks you like on it."

Your cd "PLAY DOMJOTHUMAN" was released on your own Commercial Suicide label, why this?

"We were about to be signed by a major, but in the end it didn't happen. We already started the Commercial Suicide label a few years ago. It is just a side-project. So far we had released some tapes, all recorded on walkmans and other lo-fi tech by underground musicians. We even released some Apers stuff. We also did a fifteen hours long session with backwords played guitarfeedback and some other weird things. There are only two fans who have our complete catalogue!
But when the deal bounced the recording was on a shelf for a few months and we didn't really like that and decided to release it ourselves, the distribution is done by De Konkurrent and the promotion by Moonchild Agency."

How do you see the future for Room 101?
"We want to release two more cds this year. One filled with hits and another one with a lot of cool songs!"