Thanks so much to Mats for the interview! I wrote about Close to Carmel a few posts back and was lucky to get in touch with him and to ask him many questions about this little known Swedish indiepop band! Discover them here on the interview but also on the new Bandcamp they have set up with all of their songs!
++ Hi Mats! Thanks so much for being up for this interview! How are you? Still making music?
Fine. Still recording and making sounds
++ Let’s go back in time. What are your first music memories? Do you remember what was your first instrument? How did you learn to play it? What sort of music did you listen at home while growing up?
I remember my older sister making tapes of her favorite songs. Taping them off the radio and making little collages on the cassette cover. 80’s type of music, ballads and Stock Aitken and Waterman type dance numbers. Always sounding over saturated with the bass booming and the synths soaring. I still got some of the tapes, the are magical.
++ Had you been in other bands before Close to Carmel? What about the rest of the members? If so, how did all of these bands sound like? Are there any recordings?
Later around when I was 12-13 I got into the punk scene. It was interesting. All this loud and anti authoritarian music was quite different for a timid kid coming from a quiet home in the suburbs. It was liberating. I took the train to the nearest town (Lund) and started buying records. It also made me want to pick up a guitar and make noise and so i did. I probably started with the bass first, playing with friends at the youth recreation center. It sounded horrible. A year later we had a band called ”the Benson Band”. We played live quite a bit. The music was a strange blend of punk and funk and surf with a horn-section. Basically we were a partyband. No recordings were made but we went into a studio once. We were so young and it wasn’t important to have a demo back then. We probably broke up around 1996. By then I had moved to Malmö and started recording my own music at home. First on two tape recorders and then I got a Fostex 4 track porta for my 17th birthday. Inspired by the lo-fi scene and especially the solo stuff Lou Barlow made, I started spewing out hundreds of noisy pop nuggets, learning my craft. At that time I became very isolated and depressed and eventually dropped of school.
++ When and how did the band start? How did you all meet? How was the recruiting process?
A Few years later I meet Jens, the drummer for Close to Carmel, online. It was in a forum dedicated to ”Soft Rock”. I had switched my music interest a bit, from moody lo-fi to sunny 60’s music and was collecting vinyl from this era. He, and some others, was starting up a club i Malmö with that kind of music (the first of its kind in Sweden) called ”incense and peppermint” and asked me if i wanted to come. I later discovered that he also made music and we exchanged cd’s. I thought hes songs were great and so we decided to start a band! This must have been around 2003. We hooked up with another guy, Anders, on bass, that Jens had played with before (I think they played some kind of symphonic rock) and got a little rehearsal space at the docks and soon we had a couple of songs. Mostly we brought complete songs to rehearsal and then arranged them for the band. I sang on mine and Jens on his. We tried to use vocal harmonies as much as possible, as we all three sang, and it sure sounded good at the moment with all these reverb drenched overtones bouncing around the room but sadly we never did capture that sound on record. I guess our influences were from the 60’s. Someone compared us to that ”Notorious Byrd Brothers” record and I guess it has some similarities. I was really in love with singers that had a high pitched angelic voice like Curt Boettcher and he was a big influence on me.
++ What’s the story behind the band’s name?
The band name came from a song I liked with the band Fun & Games. It was a very spontaneous choice, I was looking thru the albums tracks on the cover and picked one that sounded good. Carmel seemed like a nice place. I’m a movie buff and liked the old Roger Corman and AIP films from the 50’s and 60’s. They shot many scenes at Carmel. Ragged rocks and endless deserted beaches by a stormy sea (I’m sure it looks quite different toady) so I knew about the place.
++ There is very little information on the web about the band. Is the “It’s Close to Carmel” the only release you put together? Where did you record the songs on this CD?
We recorded the tracks on a digital porta-studio and put them together at my place. It was all very low budget with crappy equipment and a very basic recording program. The process was pretty rushed and the music came out a bit sloppy. I surely wanted it to sound more sophisticated but we decided to keep the songs and that became our demo. Today I think they sound ok. I probably like Silhouettes the most because I recorded it myself and took some time on it.
++ What about gigs? Did you play many?
Some other people heard the demo like Henrik from Caroline Soul. He liked it and we arranged a show together. It went alright i guess. Playing live was always a double edged sword for me, it was quite a pleasurable pain. There wasn’t many shows after that one. I remember one we played an acoustic set on a outdoors festival with cows mooing in the background and I got stung by a bee. And one we played in Lund at a student-club where we won some best demo band price and was put on a compilation (the song ”Sandy”). There wasn’t many places for small bands to play and there really wasn’t any local scene. Malmö was much smaller town back then. And we were a lazy band. No one knew or cared about us because we never tried to promote ourselves or sell our record and we weren’t smart or trendy.
++ When and why did Close to Carmel stop making music? Were you involved in any other bands afterwards?
There were some problems in the group, lack of ambition and too many compromises. Jens and I didn’t work together very well. It was frustrating I quit many times and finally we decided to sink the ship. That must been around 2004. I made a promise to never play in a band again and the next thing I did was to join another band ha! That was Pet Squad. Jens started playing with Caroline Soul and Anders got married. I continued with my solo lo-fi project Mind Control Hands and had some success but that is another story. Today I play noisy and nostalgic music with a friend. The Band is called Tiny Bats and we are working on releasing a cassette in a couple of months.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
