The Inquisition: 005.Saåad

1. How did you come up with the name of the band?

It’s a very simple idea; it’s a translation of our music - an elongated sadness. But to be sincere, when I started this project, I tried to break the rules of dark ambient, and this name is hiding a cheesy reference, like a teenage tweet “I’m so saaaaaaad”. Sadness is often sublimed in art, but sadness can be a really common, boring, and clichéd feeling too. That’s why I also chose pink circles on my first releases. But I’ve understood that it’s useless, some people will always see our music as something purely dark and lyrical.

2. Do you have a standard procedure of creating a song? Do you just jam around or is there a main riff and the track is build up on it?

There’s a very different process for each album. Generally we start by a drone or something that we called a “tapis” (literally a carpet) and then we jam on it while it’s recording, but there’s no rule. On “Confluences” or for “Deep/Float” this role was given to the field recordings track, which led us. Some mornings I wake up and there’s a Greg’s improv in my mailbox and I re-jam over it, sometimes it’s the opposite, and sometimes it’s pure live. We want to keep it anarchic. We can keep 3 different tracks from a 2 hours unexpected jam session and then block on another “theme” during weeks. We have maybe 20 different versions of After Love, when other tracks are coming from random jams. But our last album was maybe the most difficult record to do. We’ve released a lot of things these last years and we don’t want to repeat a recipe. We never thrashed so much hours of recordings.

3. What are your influences and what kind of music do you hear when you are at home?

I don’t like this question, as I’m listening to music everyday from 9AM to 6PM … Even doing a top ten is a pain for me! If I must answer for both of us, these past months we were listening a lot to Damian Valles’ Extrusions & Chris Watson’s El Tren Fantasma. About our influences, we’re both coming from punk-hardcore scene, and “rock music” in general is a big part of our background. Greg is listening to baroque music and classical music 99% of his time. But we like a lot of different things and it can be electronic, techno, post-rock, ambient, garage, hip-hop. These days I’m more focused on traditional music, like Aashish Khan for example. Due to my implication in BLWBCK, I’m also listening to the catalog a lot, from the demos, to the mixes, to the master version. I have a LAST FM profile if you want to stalk me.

4. What is the first record you've ever bought?

Michael Jackson “Bad” 12’’ when I was 4 year-old.

5. Name a band that you would like to share the stage or tour with?

Another impossible question as it’s very hard to pick only one artist…. It would be nice to tour with Flaming Lips, it should be better than a Burning man trip, full of all-nighter jams!!!  But I could do a 40-name list with no problems.

6. Did the internet and specially the blogs helped to spread your music around the world? Name a place (country) that you were surprised to know your music has reached to?

I remember I have shipped one Orbs & Channels tape in Kingston, Jamaïca, which was really fun for a “dark-ambient” tagged tape!
Blogs are very important for us, and some of them like yours have been supporting us for a long time. It means a lot for us and nothing would have been possible without it. The blog “deleted scenes, forgotten dreams” spread the world about Saåad by posting Pink Sabbath on their picky & amazing blogspot. Warren Ellis posted it on this blog few days after and my bandcamp stats exploded! Everything started like that. I’ve also discovered Postdrome, EUS & Stitched Vision on this blog… I’m really sad they’ve stopped selecting records and sharing their very good tastes. I miss them like I miss a lot of amazing bloodspot websites!

7. Do you support the idea of Bandcamp where fans can decide the price or services like Spotify?

Our music is available on our Bandcamp, most of it for “pay what you want” with no minimum, which means free. When somebody CHOOSES to give 10 dollars, it goes directly to us, not to Apple, not to some big stream service. People want free music, but even when you’re recording, mixing, doing the artwork by yourself, you’ll need to pay somebody for the mastering, change your broken material …  Our creativity is often limited by our small budget, so yes, each small donation counts and is well spend. Spotify & co? … not for me. It’s easy to find our music for free. The good thing about the “pay what you want” thing is that every time the question is asked to the listener, how much is it worth, do I want to support this artist? Because this is the real question, is music really worth $0.99? If you compare it to what it represents in our life …    

8. Where do you see yourselves in 5 years?

I really don’t know. If I look back to 5 years ago, this project didn’t exist, even in my head. For two months we’ve been focused on a new collaborative album with EUS & Postdrome, two years after “Sustained Layers”. We’re almost done, but it will keep us busy until the end of May and the beginning of new & big project. I can’t say anything about it yet, but we will be totally dedicated to this until the end of the year and I can’t see beyond that project for the moment. It’s a commissioned work but like for “Confluences”, we have a free hand!

9. Is the artwork of an album important nowadays in the digital era?

Pictures are everywhere, even more in the digital world than in real life. So yes … but it has nothing to do with the sex appeal of a vinyl or tape edition.

10. It seems that a lot of people are turning on vinyl again. Why do you think that is and which is your preferable media format?

Yes, but It’s a 10 years old story, no? Maybe it’s because I came from the punk-hardcore scene, where vinyl has always been the reference or experimental scene where listeners are maybe more concerned about artists support & physical edition … But I see vinyl everywhere since 2001. This is also my favorite format, for common reasons, fetishism, big artwork, the sound, the ritual … some people called that “slow-listening”?

11. What's the funniest story or moment as a band?

Certainly the recording of “You’ve Showed Me The Way” on Delayed Summer. It was between some “serious” takes, we were joking and to relax, we started to play some rock’n’roll stuff full of western gimmicks. Still laughing, we violently sent the tape into a time shifter pedal. When we heard the result for the first time, we don’t believe it – haha! It was a really nonsense moment, a total joke, and it became that crazy track. We’ve never listened to the original version and just recorded the result from the pedal output.

Saåad recently released their first full length album Deep / Float.

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