Diary Of Dreams
Going For A Greater Goal

27.04.2009

It’s interesting to see what fame does to different musicians. Some feel obliged to do the same thing over and over again to preserve public attention, while for others fame is like a relief, it gives them the opportunities to do what they’ve always wanted but have not been able to due to limitations of financial or other nature. They never follow people’s expectations, yet people seem to love them even more every time they change and challenge the audience. Adrian Hates, mastermind of gothic icons Diary Of Dreams, definitely belongs to the latter category. After an extremely dark and complicated trilogy of CD releases (“Giftraum” – “Nigredo” – “Menschfeind”) and an even darker album called “Nekrolog 43”, everybody expected Adrian to continue making large-scale conceptual opuses, but he did just the opposite – the new Diary Of Dreams album, “(if)”, contains 12 separate pieces of music. Naturally, we couldn’t pass by such bravery and jumped at the opportunity to talk to Adrian again even though our previous interview happened only a lit more than a year ago …

This Friday will see the release of your ninth studio album “(if)”. What do you feel a few days before the release date? Is it accomplishment, is it like “I should have done so many things differently”, or is it something else?

I’m very fortunate to have an amazing team of people around me, starting from the people at the distribution company, my folks at the label, my manager Albert, and all the bookers worldwide, including Russian Synth Community. There are so many people – the graphic team, the photography team, the video people -  everybody around me has been so much of help and so much supportive. Without them there would have been no chance for me to release an album right now, it would have probably taken me a year longer. I’m really thankful for their support.

I don’t think we could have done… let me say… “better” sounds a little bit arrogant, I don’t want it to sound that way, but I’m very satisfied with what we achieved. I’m very satisfied with the whole promotion that we did – there have been over 50,000 viewers of the videoclip only on MySpace. That’s amazing, that’s far more than I expected and hoped for. The interest in the new album is very big, surprisingly big after the big shock of Nekrolog 43”. (laughs) I’m really enjoying the moment, and I’m pretty much counting the days and looking forward to the final release. We’re already getting prepared for the first concerts, we’re gonna be out there soon and really celebrating the new album onstage.

A posting on your website reads that “(if)” is not a concept album, which is something completely unexpected after the trilogy and “Nekrolog 43”. Why did you decide not to go for a concept record this time, and how much did this decision change the working process?

A lot, actually. Already after “Nekrolog 43” I announced that this was the closure of the concept album series that we started with “Giftraum”. All that time I was just working on conceptual material, and it was great fun, it was a very exciting and very challenging process. But I don’t want to be the victim of expectations. Whenever people think that they can foresee what I’m doing next, I’m changing it – not because I wanna be different, because I don’t want to be somebody’s marionette and to whatever the people expect from me. I just wanna do whatever my creativity and my moment tell me to.

The last year was pretty difficult for me on a private basis. I reached a few points when I really needed to sit down and reconsider a couple of decisions that I made. I’m talking only on a private level, not about musical or business levels, it’s just really my personal life. I ended up really asking myself all these “if” questions. I wasn’t happy with the fact that I found myself in the opposition, so I decided that I needed to work on that. So I sat down and basically put those “if” and “what if” questions on paper. “What if you have done this or that?” I ended up with something like 16 questions, and I thought that would be an interesting idea to use these questions, every question as an inspiration for one song, and come up with a little story, a fairytale, a fable, whatever – describing the dilemma of these questions. That’s really the origin of the album.

If you wanna call if a concept album, in a tiny degree it is, but I prefer to say this whole thing was the idea for the album, It was the initial spark, the starting point, but not really a concept. The work on this album was very free, very open, and I enjoyed that very much. I enjoyed writing single songs, so that the meaning of the song starts with the song and ends with the song. Of course, there are connections to old albums, there are connections to earlier songs, and also to stuff from “Nekrolog 43”, but that’s because it’s my personality, it’s me writing that stuff. That’s why it’s always sort of connected, but it’s not a concept. I really wanted the freedom of doing something completely different now.

By the way, is the story you were telling on the trilogy and “Nekrolog 43” now completed for good, or shall we expect another chapter of this story somewhere in the future?

An interesting idea! I never really say never, because you now look at this concept that you were following and think it’s over, you’ve found the final chapter, but maybe a couple of years later you’ll have an absolutely brilliant idea how to continue or you’ll actually feel that it was not done. If I say now, “No, totally not, I’ll never do this!”, I will basically ruin this chance of an open horizon for me. That’s what I never want to do. I say, “It’s not like me that I will do it, but it’s of course possible.” Maybe in some years from now I’ll feel inspired by the story and want to continue where we stopped – who knows? Gaun:A (guitar) and I are very big fans of conceptual works, and I could see us working on a concept album again, for sure. There is no doubt that I’ll do it again, but I can’t tell you now what the concept is gonna be about. (laughs)

You have mentioned a videoclip for the new song “The Wedding”, and this is really big news, because it’s something that Diary Of Dreams have never done before Why do you go for it at this particular point in time? I’m sure there was a demand for a video before, so what changed in the year 2009 and made you do it now?

A lot of things. First of all, a couple of years back the people I knew that offered help on videoclips were either awfully expensive but superb in their results, or they were reasonable in their prices, but I didn’t like their past efforts. That was my dilemma of the early years, and a couple of years back it was still there. Then we did the DVD (“Nine In Numbers”) together with Guido, and I was really excited with what he actually put into life on the DVD. I had this in the back of my head, I thought, “If some day you really wanna do a videoclip again, you gotta contact Guido.” He’s also our live technician, and on the last tour in Russia we had a lot of time on the trains, as you can imagine (laughs), and a lot of talking, so we finally had the chance to talk about the past and the future and make plans.

During the “Nekrolog 43” era there was so much going on, there was so much stress, and I had so much to do, that I really decided I didn’t wanna do a videoclip on top of all that. We had the single at that point, and it also consumed a lot of time. But this time I talked to Albert, our manager, and Gaun:A, as we are the main guys in the band, so we were discussing this subject, and we said, “A single is something that is so domestic, it’s only for Germany, and it hardly goes over the borders, because it’s just not feasible, it gets too expensive to purchase.” So we thought, “Maybe we’ll do a videoclip instead of the single, it is a teaser for an album that is much more international and much more interesting for everybody than a four-track single. Let’s not do the single this time and use the extra tracks that we have for the complete album and for the bonus CD in the limited edition, a video is much more interesting.”

I’m pretty damn sure that I’ll do the same thing for the next album. I really love this concept, and it really worked out. I might even consider doing two videoclips and no single for the next album. It was just the good thing to do, and now we have the right people around us. Guido’s amazing, I really love his work. He’s doing that for a living, and he’s a professional, I was really amazed by what he delivered quality-wise. You can hardly see that on MySpace or YouTube, it’s difficult to evaluate the quality of a videoclip there, but it’s amazing, it can be easily out there with all these major industry videoclips, because the quality is very high. I’m happy, and a lot of other people liked it. When over 50,000 people have seen it, it must be interesting at least. (laughs)

What was the shooting process like? As far as I understand, making a video is quite different from making a photo shoot, right?

Of course, it is very different. We had a lot of challenges, because the location we were shooting at was and still remains an empty place. I’m not allowed to say much about it, because the owner wants to keep it secret, all I can tell you is that the place did not have heating or electricity. (laughs) We had some cables from the neighboring house going over there to have little artificial light and be able to make photographs, because there was not enough sunlight. What was challenging is the fact that we had a maximum of two degrees Celsius during the photo shoot, and if you look at the pictures, you will see that none of us really had thick clothing on. I just had a shirt and an open jacket, so it was really quite cold, I can tell you. When you look at some of the pictures – not the ones we chose for the promo campaign, but those of the “making of” category which we will put online in a couple of days – you can see breath in front of our mouths.

The cold didn’t demotivate us. The team was great, we had a great spirit, and we really wanted to do it right. Of course, there’s a lot of differences between photo shooting and video shooting – the video needs activity, constant moving of persons, while the photography is exactly the opposite, you have to stand still for much longer periods of time. We chose a lot of different locations for taking pictures, ran around the whole place – it’s difficult to describe because sometimes the video shootings were going on simultaneously to the photo shoot. It was quite a complex event, but I’m vey happy with the final result.

I understand that the video is a powerful marketing tool, but is it possible for a band like Diary Of Dreams to air this video somewhere else apart from the Internet? What are the chances of seeing it on German TV?

It’s a good question, we’re working on it right now. We’re working together with a couple of companies and trying to promote it at the right places. I don’t know what the final results of that will be, we have a lot of contact partners in Greece, Russia and many other countries, we’re trying to get help from our distributors, labels, promoters or whatever in giving the videoclip to the right people who can put it on TV. I can’t tell you what the chances are, I guess rather low, but I would love to be able to present it to a wider audience. I’m not hurt, or I don’t feel bad if it doesn’t happen, I’m happy with where we are and what our audience is, but of course, it would be kind of funny to see the video on MTV, Viva or VH1, for instance. I don’t need this for my ego, I won’t feel better afterwards, I will just have fun.  

As long as we started speaking about marketing and promotion - you are one of the few people who not only perform music, but also release it. Is it easy or difficult for you to combine playing in Diary Of Dreams and working with Accession Records? Many people believe that these two jobs don’t mix because musicians and businessmen have completely different goals and visions…

(pause) I’m not a fan of generalizing things like that, because it always depends on an individual case. In my case, I started off being a musician, writing music. I watched labels in the early 1990s, I watched how they worked, and I just thought that the results they achieved were rather poor, and their motivation and support for the bands was rather limited. I also have this experience as an artist myself trying to find a record label and working with a record label, because my first CD, as you might know, was not released by myself, it was put out by a different label. I just noticed that very often that there were a lot of obstacles in communication between the label and the artist, so labels don’t understand how the artists think and how they feel. For a lot of record companies, this is a product, period. For artists, it’s their flesh and blood. It’s the highest thing they can possibly imagine, it’s like a little child of theirs. Labels have very often been disrespectful in their communication with artists, and I think this is something that in this way could never happen at Accession Records. I know how you feel about your CD, and I know how you want to be talked with when it comes to that. I know what the artist wants to achieve, where he wants to go, and in very many cases I can help much more than a record label usually can, because I have experiences in this field. When it comes to technicians, photographers, or make-up designers, or graphic designers, or promoters, or contact people in all those countries – I know them personally, because I have been there on my tours. What other label boss travels around the world with the bands and meets those people? When I come back from a foreign country, I have a direct contact to those people, and I really know much more about the territory, about the promotion that is needed there, than a person that has not been there, naturally and obviously. So I think I can do a good service for musicians and artists that a regular salesman surely cannot do.

We are now in the midst of the global economic crisis, and many experts say it will change the global economy completely. Do you think the CD as a medium will survive the crisis? I’m quite worried about it because I see a few Russian labels already suspending their activities, because no one’s buying CDs anymore…

You’ll be surprised to find out that in every single interview I’ve been giving in the past three weeks – which is around 40 interviews – this question has always been asked. This really seems to be a matter of concern for everybody these days, everybody seems to be worried about it. Everybody is scared and insecure, because they don’t know how to deal with the situation, and are looking for answers. I feel pretty insecure in the position of being asked this question, because, first of all, I’m neither a politician nor a scientist, I don’t know what to respond. First of all, I’m a human being, and I don’t think that my opinion is very fundamental or detailed or based on knowledge. It’s simply based on emotions and how I see the development.

It’s obvious that the crisis will have a major effect on every tiny piece of the chain that is connecting all markets, and we will all notice it here and there – some harder, some less. The past couple of years have shown that people need to save money, and the first quarter where they save money is on entertainment. They still need to pay their rent, they still need to have a warm house, they still need water, electricity and food, and a lot of them still need cars and gasoline to get to their work or whatever, but buying CDs or DVDs, going out to the movies or concerts, buying merchandize – these things will have a major dropdown. On the one hand, I can understand this, on the other hand, it’s very disrespectful to my person and to every artist that spends a fortune to record and compose an album. After all, we need to survive, too. I’ve read a study that today human beings generally listen to music four times longer per day than they did 10 years ago. Which is very interesting – people actually consume more music, but pay less. It’s very contradictory and very unfair. Once again, I can understand that in times of crisis people try to spend as little money as possible and have some money on the safe side, or they are simply forced to spend less money because they have less, and there’s no option. Everybody is scared and insecure, because, first of all, people don’t know what they can do to prevent a catastrophe for themselves and their family. Of course, I hope that me and my family will not suffer this catastrophe. We shall see where we end in a couple of years, I’m not able to foresee it, and I’m not even gonna dare to foresee it. I will just do my very best to fight and survive.

Let’s go back to the music. Can you say a few words about the limited edition of the new album and the bonus CD “G(if)t”? Why aren’t these four songs part of the regular album?

You can’t fit 16 songs on a CD, that’s the first point. There’s not enough time, and I would need to compress the tracks. Also I think that an album with 12 songs is enough already. These four extra songs are very dear to me, but they didn’t fit in the flow of the album. We discussed that – Gaun:A, Albert and I – to choose the songs that will have to be put aside, and very quickly we all agreed on these four songs. We then had to decide what to do with these songs, as long as we didn’t have a single, and we went like, “Let’s do a bonus CD of this material.” These songs are really dear to me, and we’re even gonna play “Never Tell The Widow” and “Regicide” live. But we had to make a decision, and we made one.

That’s what you will find on the bonus CD. On top of that you will get a 48-page booklet with all lyrics, a poster and a digipack in which the two CDs are packaged. I believe nice packaging really makes a product worth its price.

You told me in our previous interview that this band is not about individuals, it’s about the music. At the same time, in the eyes of the majority of people Diary Of Dreams is about Adrian Hates. Isn’t that a paradox, and is there a way to change people’s perception somehow?

It’s difficult to say. People focus on Diary Of Dreams by looking at me and see me as the representation of the band because in the early days it was pretty much the project of Adrian Hates. Whoever saw any of our old booklets was mainly focused on me, because it simply was that way in the first couple of years. But that changed when Gaun:A and DNS joined the band, and the three of us are now a very tight team. Since Gaun:A joined me, he has been an extremely important and very essential member of the band, and I can’t think of Diary of Dreams without Gaun:A. The same thing is with DNS. I think that the way people see Diary Of Dreams today is a little different. A lot of people really enjoy and appreciate Gaun:A and DNS and find them important for  the band. They have had a very big recognition in the past couple of years, especially since we did all the concerts, and you could really experience the guys live. They’re one hell of a presence on stage, DNS is one hell of a drummer, and he’s a really pleasant character. And when Gaun:A plays the guitar, I always call him an “ice cube”, because the way he does his performance and the way he plays is are so cool that I very much admire his work. Of course, I am the singer, and the singer is always in the focus. But nobody really complains about it. Gaun:A is pretty happy that he’s not that much in the focus and the foreground as I am. But I don’t think that the rest of the guys are in my shadow, we’re a band, and it’s important that we are the way we are.

Everybody’s heard about the incident you had in Poland last year, when some religious fanatics cut the power and you couldn’t play. There was another incident, when a record plant in Germany refused to print “Nekrolog 43” on vinyl. As far as I know, you had never had such incidents before…

We had! The same happened with “Menschfeind”, nobody wanted to print it either.

Do you think “Nekrolog 43” and the previous trilogy has something specifically dark or shocking about it, or is it just because the band is getting more popular and attracts the attention of more “outside people”?

(sighs) We are definitely much more into the spotlight, you are right with that. We get more attention, especially the mainstream press is watching us a little more than in the past. On the other hand, I think that “Nekrolog 43” and “Menschfeind” were provoking. I was aware that there would be people who would probably not like what they see, but I’m going for a greater goal than the opinions of fanatics. I think it was important to say what I said. I’m not anti-religious, I’m not a hater of any religion or spirituality though I’m not religious myself. Yet I respect others and I would never go out there and try to boycott, for instance, a celebration of the Catholic church. It would be silly, ridiculous and immature. On the other hand, they did this to me, and that’s without knowing what they were talking about. At that Polish festival we were really the main act, and we were the cause of the problem. But we had a press conference earlier, and every religious fanatic, the Catholic church itself or just everybody could have come there and ask us questions about their concerns, about what bothers them and about what they think we represent. Nobody did.

The Catholic church is saying that it’s very important to look for a dialogue between the people that they cannot put in the right place for themselves or the people that they don’t understand. You’re supposed to look for a dialogue, to communicate and to get rid of the prejudices. But I don’t understand why nobody gave us this chance. It is specifically sad for 1,000 fans who came to this concert. They were not able to see the show because a few fanatics were thinking that we are black magicians and Satanists. In pure English, that’s just bullshit! If they read our mythology and what we have put together, based on ancient books and our own imagination, if they would really have taken their time to read it, they would have known that we’re not what they think us to be. But they just heard a few lines, heard some talk, saw some pictures, and that’s it, the decision is made, and we’re pronounced guilty. That’s immature. We’re in the year 2009, and I think we should be further than that. The church did this a couple of thousand years back, and they should finally stop doing it.

As far as I understand, these fanatics are afraid that young people will hear your music and it will influence them so much that they would become different people. When you were a kid, was there any music that changed you as an individual, and kind of shaped you to become what you are today?

You know, going back to this Polish incident – they tried to prevent us from having an effect on the public, but by boycotting us, they made us much more popular. It was a huge promotion for us, we were pretty much on every TV show in Poland for a week, we were in every mainstream magazine, we were in daily news. Everybody discussed it, and I have not read a single article that said that these fanatics were right. Everybody said it was immature and stupid. That was the exact opposite of what they wanted to achieve.

In my childhood, I was not following one specific band, but I was really drawn by this genre, this dark and strange scene that was quite strange, yet very attractive for me as a 15-year-old at that point. Since I was a very small child, I have always loved the black color, my mother can prove it. She hated me for it, because I was always wearing black stuff! (laughs) I really loved this whole atmosphere that was going on in the clubs and the little bars that we had, it was like home to me. That’s why I just went for that music in general, I was not going for one specific band, and I cannot say that any band had this effect on me. I liked early Depeche Mode, early Clan Of Xymox, Front 242, Fields Of The Nephilim, Sisters Of Mercy – pretty much every band that was there, and there wasn’t that many in those days. I really enjoyed alternative music and dark music, and I still do.

When you were promoting “Nekrolog 43”, you played acoustic sets at listening parties. How will the listening parties in support of “(if)” look like? What kind of surprises will the visitors be up to this time?

It’s gonna be pretty boring compared to what we did in those days. (laughs) It was a lot of work, and it took us a lot of preparing to do this. I don’t want to repeat things over and over again, because they become a ritual, and rituals are things that people start to expect at some point, and that is something I don’t want. I will really do this rather simple this time – I’m doing a DJ set, I’m there to talk to the people, I’m there to sign CDs and photographs, I’m just there. Gaun:A and DNS are gonna be there as well. That’s really what we do – celebrating the release of a new album with our fans. I would much rather look for an acoustic set again in the near future, but right now we have too much work preparing all the concerts that are approaching quickly. We are unable to invest more time in the acoustic set. After all, the Russian tour is not far away, I think it’s in six weeks, and it’s more important to prepare for it property than to do acoustic concerts.

I heard that this time you will do a month-long tour all across Russia. What expectations do you have for that tour, especially given that this time you will go to places that most of the Western tourists don’t see?

Whenever I have people here in Germany that come to me and say, “I’ve been to Russia and it’s been like this and this,” I say, “Let me guess – you’ve been to St. Petersburg and to Moscow?” They say, “Yeah, but how do you know? I say, “It’s obvious, because the country is a little bigger than Moscow and St. Petersburg.” Though these two cities are amazing, the country itself is so huge, and there are so many different facets and characteristics of the cities, I was so amazed! I really loved the previous tour, and, as you know, it was in the middle of the winter, so it was all white, but this time it’s gonna be late spring, so I’m very curious to see some of the places that we’ve already been to, but in a different look.

My picture of the country is very positive. I really enjoyed the tour very much, I really enjoyed meeting a lot of the people, it was great fun. We have great friends there, and our collaboration with Russian Synth Community is really great. They are such nice people and helping us so much. I really am very much looking forward for the current tour. Yes, it will again be bigger, we’re gonna be there for four weeks, and it just makes me smile. I love touring, it’s gonna be a blast, we’re gonna have a lot of concerts, and I’m very curious to see how many people will show up this time.

Diary Of Dreams on the Internet: http://www.diaryofdreams.de

Special thanks to Alexei Kuzovlev (Irond) for arranging this interview.

Roman “Maniac” Patrashov
March 10, 2009
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