KAADA

Selected Discography

Exclusive Interview

Interview questions and responses are provided courtesy of the press information section of Kaada’s web site.

Xtreme Music: How did you meet Mike Patton and Ipecac Recordings?

John Kaada: My band, since childhood, is called Cloroform. It’s 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 bedroom studio 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.

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

John Kaada: 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.

Xtreme Music: How did you work together and how long did it take?

John Kaada: The cooperation with the album started for real when the Kaada Band joined in on the Ipecac Geek Tour Summer 2003. We traveled around Europe, and had some time off to develop the direction of the album. The first vocal takes where done hotel rooms. Since then, we’ve been sending CDs to eachother 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. This is a complex and colourful 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. Wrong. We went on for a period of eight 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.

Xtreme Music: Who did what on the “Romances” album?

John Kaada: 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 track 2 and track 7. The contributions on the album, all in all, are about 50% Mike and 50% me.

Xtreme Music: How did you choose the name “Romances”? What can you tell us about the references to french musique and the use of french language for titles?

John Kaada: 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.

Xtreme Music: Any chance to hear “Romances” live, even in France?

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

Xtreme Music: Any chance of a next collaboraton with Mike Patton?

John Kaada: We’ve started doing some sound experiments and stuff, but it is to early to tell if this will ever turn into a new album, or anything at all. My current album discography can be viewed online, plus a full filmography is available on the Internet Movie Database [https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1145570/].

Xtreme Music: Thank you for giving me your valuable time.