Evil Nine - Axes Of Evil
3D’s Nina Bertok speaks with British geezers Evil Nine, throwing hip hop, electro and zombies into the mix to create They Live!, their second LP.
Despite a downright misleading name, UK’s electro dance duo Evil Nine are the real deal. Instead of rehashing the formula behind their successful 2005 debut album You Can Be Special Too, the DJ/producer lads – known to their parents as Tom Beaufoy and Pat Pardy – took a brave chance with 2008 follow-up They Live! and headed for a whole new direction.
Recalling the recording process, Pardy describes the sophomore record as “The difficult second album”.
“I’ve got to admit the process was pretty difficult this time around,” he says. “Our first album did well and people know us for a certain sound and although we love that sound the fact is that we wrote You Can Be Special Too four years ago and we didn’t want to make the same album again.”
As a result, They Live! is about as organic as the duo get, admits Beaufoy. “We just get in the studio and fuck about. We’re massively into old sci-fi horror soundtrack composers like Fabio Frizzi, from the dance scene we love Midnight Juggernauts, and it goes through to weird folk, country music and death metal,” he says. “We also love the mix of old synthesizers, arpeggios, moody strings, choirs and gloomy atmospherics which all made a big impression on the sound of our album.”
A mixed bag, then, but one well worth dipping into, with guest appearances from EL-P, Beans from Anti Pop Consortium, Emily Breeze – “the female Danzig,” Pardy enthuses – Dave from autoKratz and Seraphim from No Surrender. “We nearly got Mark E Smith from The Fall on the record but the negotiations got a bit flaky,” laments Beaufoy. “We’ve also always wanted to collaborate with singers that we have loved since way back, like Kim Deal from the Pixies, Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth and Robert Smith from The Cure.”
Pardy puts the wishlist down to his and Beaufoy’s musical backgrounds.
“Both of us played bass in rock bands when we were younger. We were introduced by some old friends of mine and talked about writing some music together. We find it strange when you get duos that never cross paths in the studio, our music is very much our music and we enjoy making it together. I would imagine we would be pulling against each other if we worked separately, like, one of us would probably spend all night working on something just to have the other come in the next day and hate it.”
Beaufoy affirms that in the studio, Evil Nine are all about the unity.
“We slogged it out together for very long sessions, sometimes we would be locked in the studio from eight to 14 hours a day. It’s great when you’re on a roll and you can see something special emerging but when you’re stuck in front of a blank screen, you’ve got no ideas and the sun is shining outside, that’s when the tedium creeps in.”
Rain or shine, Beaufoy and Pardy couldn’t be happier with their awesomely schizophrenic second album.
“Fans seem to be really loving the few album tracks we’ve posted up on our myspace, though obviously you get the forum lurkers that bitch about us, but that’s all part of the fun.”
WHO: Evil Nine
WHAT: They Live through Marine Parade / Inertia
WHEN: Out 1 November
MORE: myspace.com/evilnine