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An Interview with Ronan Harris of VNV Nation
Posted: Wednesday, May 05, 2010
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

What can be said about VNV Nation that has not already been said? For 15 years, Ronan Harris and Mark Jackson have been at the forefront of the underground electro scene, incorporating elements of EBM, trance, synthpop, and points in between to create a style that has become known as futurepop. Having moved away from the convention that they themselves helped to establish, the band has moved into other areas of sonic and musical exploration, all the while maintaining a poignant lyrical perspective that has enabled their music to be a source of inspiration and guidance to many seeking solace from a world all too ready to embrace the darkness rather than run to the light. Harris balances intellect with emotion as his views on life in the modern era take on the perspectives of historical reference and insight, all set to a brand of electronic music that is decidedly aggressive and danceable without abandoning melody and reminding audiences that there are indeed greater thoughts and considerations apparent.

With the release of 2009's Of Faith, Power and Glory on the band's own Anachron label, VNV Nation has taken the latest stage in their musical development to new levels of awareness, once again garnering attention from the mainstream without sacrificing the purity of the band's motives and message. Early in the latest North American tour, ReGen Magazine had the opportunity to speak with Harris on the evolution of VNV's musical style, along with a sneak peek into his musical mindset and just what the band has in store for the future, as well as his views on the state of electronic, independent and alternative music and just what significance the year 2012 really holds for him.

Your last album, Of Faith, Power and Glory was the first to be released on your label Anachron America, and now you have Crossing the Divide coming out, which is your first remix album since Burning Empires.

Harris: Yes, I had originally thought about doing Crossing the Divide in the same way that we did Burning Empires, but the weird thing about that is that when I did Empires, I had so many different variations of the songs; Burning Empires was an accident. I went in to do some additional remixes for the Standing single, and it turned out to be enough for a whole album. That was just the vibe of the moment; it's not something you can really make happen, and out of that, I wrote the song 'Further,' which has turned out to be one of our biggest songs. This time around, Crossing the Divide is remixes by a couple of our friends; Rotersand is of course featured, and Krischan does this amazing remix of 'Where There is Light.' He loves the song as much as I do, and when we play it live, it's the song where if I were to say this to people who are from the industrial scene, they would say, 'Yeah, OK, so? You're playing that? Big deal.' It is now, since we played it one time, the most requested song when we play live in Germany, because people finally got it. Not only do they get it, but when we played it in Hamburg, it was our last show, and we played it as an encore, but it was for me the highest point of my career. It was the most euphoric moment I've ever had. It felt so natural, like this is what I do; I sit in a studio alone and I write songs with a keyboard or piano, and in the middle of the song, I went up to the piano when the first half stops and just played. I've done this in Europe quite a few times, playing live piano. We played 'Further' at the M'era Luna Festival, and people haven't shut up about it. I did an acoustic version of 'Further.' It's on YouTube. The microphone kept moving away from my mouth, so it sounds like I'm singing all weakly. I went off and did this section in the middle of the song, and you could hear a pin drop in the venue, and people just stood there, stunned. I continued to play piano until the end of the song, so I was sitting there bashing away, and it wasn't intentional, but a lot of bands I like play a variety of instruments, and I really liked that idea for once. I said, 'Well, we can't play it without the piano part, and I'm not going to have one of the keyboardists do it; this is my song, and this is my Zen moment,' so I wound up playing it through to the end of the song, and now people go nuts and smile nonstop when we do that.

There has been a prevalent usage of piano in much of your music, and while it was always present, it was never quite so overt in terms of the melodies and its placement in the mix until the more recent albums.

Harris: 'Tomorrow Never Comes' has that lead piano line, yes. And it was because of the 'Further' experience, and I was so nervous doing it that I shook, literally. Mark was trying to calm me down, and he ran out on stage when I finished it and just hugged me, because he saw what I was like the whole time. I was a nervous wreck. I was concentrating more on playing the piano than on singing, so I was worried that I was going to fuck up the words. And I did!

Given that you've recently done some score work for The Gene Generation, with some of the tracks appearing on Reformation 1, and having been including more piano in your work and with this remix album from other artists coming out, has it ever been a consideration for you to do something more acoustic, or a piano album?

Harris: There is a plan in play to meet up with a guy who I met on the July '09 tour who is a trained musician; he's not only a conductor, concert pianist, and has worked on classical arrangements for various things, but he's also a huge VNV fan. He asked me, 'Do you mind if I write a classical score based on some VNV songs?' I thought, 'Yeah, like I'm going to have a problem with that?' I can't get those sounds big enough on the records. We're going to meet up and talk about doing a show, actually, with classical piano and a 40-piece orchestra. The good thing about that is that we can use different orchestras for this, because of the way classical music is written and the way classical musicians are trained. All you need is the sheet music and two days of rehearsal, and that's it. I know what the cost is as far as an orchestra is concerned, and I know what the venue will be like; there's no lighting to worry about, no extra tour bus or anything like that to worry about. We can do it in Seattle, and DC has a got a really good philharmonic orchestra, and there are a ton of places that we can play this. I think it's got to be somewhere prestigious. But then we have the issue of what's Mark's going to do? It wouldn't really work with him playing pots and pans in the corner. It would be like Ruprecht from the film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. [Laughs.]

I would love to do more acoustic stuff, because I've always played piano; I started on piano. That was the whole reason I did the 'Further' acoustic performance. It was so natural for me, and I know that sounds really pretentious, especially to people who play it and so it's a regular instrument. But for someone like me in the electronic world, I'm not afforded that opportunity, and I really loved going back to my roots, in a way. I write my songs like this, just sitting there, playing away in a studio, playing what I feel and what I think, and that's if they're not sequence or sound-based songs.

The reason that's perhaps not pretentious is because of the way electronic music has gone; many people these days don't have a musical background and simply hit keys.

Harris: Yes, but I don't mind that so much, because even Depeche Mode were one of those bands. They weren't very talented when they started out, and they didn't know what a chord was. Vince Clarke even had the notes written out on his keyboard.

And then Alan Wilder came along, and he did have that musical background.

Harris: Exactly! But when you think about the history of electronic music, I like the variety, because VNV's music, I think, always has been varied. It's not like we're going to become an acoustic band; we won't! But I love adding sounds that have this kind of harmonic vibe to them. They are synthesized, but let's say some of these sounds on 'Testament' or on 'The Great Divide' that are guitar-ish, but electronic sounds.

On the topic of electronic music and having been making music for well over 20 years now...

Harris: Yes, ever since I was 13...

And considering some of the bands you've worked with and toured with, like Apoptygma Berzerk, Covenant, Rotersand, Soman, Imperative Reaction, etc., what are your thoughts on the progression of electronic music?

Harris: I think it's more important to speak in terms of everything outside the 'scene,' because we are a part of it, but we don't sound like much of it. I like that there are the roots and the connections to it. But electronic music as a whole, I think, is still incredibly healthy. There is a lot of really good underground electronic music coming out in Europe. In North America, you do have this big underground trend of making bad '80s music, and it's almost like the soundtrack to bad '80s movies, and that's not a good representation of what '80s music sounded like. However, in the dance world – a huge, broad term that can describe everything from dubstep to electro to techno to trance to whatever else – there is so much creativity going on in the underground that is taking people by storm. It's amazing how healthy it is, but as a cohesive scene...I mean, trendy music that everybody can jump around to will always be the big thing that everybody will always listen to, but I think people have really moved away from the whole chill-out side of things. That was a bit of trend a couple of years ago that people have started to move away from, and it was a wider spectrum of exposing themselves to that kind of music. I love people like Max Richter, who used to work with Future Sound of London and does soundtracks for BBC documentaries, and he releases these things as albums and they are phenomenal. They're so seminal. Some of these pieces are beautiful, lush, ambient pieces. He has this one piece of classical music done with a string quartet called 'The Nature of Daylight,' which if you were to hear it, you might think, 'That needs a Ronan vocal.' It is one of the saddest but most beautiful and introspective pieces I've heard from anybody in so long. So composers and people who actually write music on their own, which is what the liberation of electronic music has become, is still very much alive and healthy. Editors went on off and did an album electronically that personally, if I was the label, I would've asked for my money back. The album has been very successful, so somebody likes it. I think it's awful, production-wise. But a lot of bands are doing this, even in the rock area of things or in the indie area of things; they're incorporating more and more electronics. It's kind of bizarre that they're getting into this, and now people are starting to think that we're getting bored with it. On the dance music side, there is so much going on underground because the commercial world isn't there for them anymore, and they're not going to make a fortune off of this stuff; they're just doing this for fun, and that's where I like it. We wrote our songs thinking nobody was going to buy them. I wrote Praise the Fallen for myself and never planned to release it; it was actually an album that was not written to be released. Empires was written for fun, because I had a full-time day job, and I really liked writing music that meant something deep to me, not intending to be played to an audience. Then it goes and does what it does. Futureperfect was written in a storage room in the back of an office with me and a computer because I had nowhere else to mix. Everybody was doing this for fun and really having a great time with it, but there was a world behind it that could support them. I could quit my job and work from it because I had to; I didn't have a choice. I had to choose one or the other at the time. The tools are there, the creativity is there, but it's buried in a wash of a lot of people who have the tools that everyone else has, and they're making twaddle. It's awful! What really annoyed me was reading this press article that read like, 'Is electronic music back?' after the Owl City album came out. [Laughs.]

That really says it. Back from what? Where did it go? But it's the fact that a lot of people would say of his sound, 'Oh, you're ripping off The Postal Service.' There again is a really good band that made it big in a totally different genre in a wash of bands called 'The something' that all tried so hard not to have an image and tried so hard not to look cool, and the less trendy, the better. There was a ton of creativity in that as well. But I think all electronic music is alive and well. There's no worry there. As far as the 'scene' is concerned, there's obviously a shitload of repetition. Cookie Monster is back with a vengeance! [Laughs.]

I never liked it! I didn't like it in the '80s. I didn't like in the '90s. They can keep bringing it back, and I'm not going to change my opinion. It's music by numbers for me; it's a formula. I went to a club night where the DJ played nothing but that for two hours, and as a music producer, I'm used to producing music with that kind of instrumentation, and I know how it's done. I seriously could not tell the fucking difference from one band to the next! All of it is like growling, you know? It's Cookie Monster with a distortion pedal! People are angry and want to punch the air, and that's great, but for God's sake!

And people seem to have this conception of VNV Nation being deep and intelligent but also angry because of your EBM and industrial roots from your early albums. With the Of Faith, Power and Glory album, and the later albums since Matter + Form, it does seem like you are using more major-key progressions.

Harris: The watershed was when we did Futureperfect and quite a few songs from that album, like 'Beloved' and 'Genesis,' were very positive-ish, because it was so caught up in the trance sound. Judgement was a very major key album. Actually, no it wasn't! But I see what you're saying. I think I just wanted to do something that felt right. We're not a huge band; seriously, in the grand scheme of things, we're still doing what we've always done and advertising ourselves the same way, relatively, so to speak, but we don't have the network behind us. We don't have a large independent behind us now. We haven't changed what we do. We still do our tours the same way, and we do a lot of things ourselves. But rather than do another album that is supposed to be what other people wants, and I've never done what other people wanted...I remember there was a tug of war when we released Matter + Form, because it was such a break from the sound, and yet 'Chrome' and 'Perpetual' are really big hits. It was funny, because 'Perpetual' took a little while to catch on, but when we play it live, people sing along to it.

And you had written in the liner notes in Reformation that 'Perpetual' was your new favorite in terms of what it meant to you.

Harris: I've always said that if I was ever run over by a truck, 'Perpetual' would say everything I've ever needed to say.

And yet, you used to say something similar about 'Solitary.'

Harris: Yes, but the difference is that I said a great deal with 'Solitary' at the time, and I encapsulated all I wanted to say at that time. But 'Solitary' said it to me; 'Perpetual' was my missile to the world, my thing that I want to pass on and impart. It's not about being remembered as much it's about what I needed to say and what people need to know and who will ask questions of me about the lyrics and their lives and how it has affected them and who they are as people, and of the journey and quest that they're on, I say, 'Everything you need to know is in this song.' That's not going to make a lot of sense to everybody, but it will make sense to people who know.

But going back to the sound change, some people are comfortable with it, and some people are not. That's just the same with any band. But it doesn't mean that we're going off to become something that we're not. We've always been a band with a lot of deep emotions, and we like to add some intellect in the lyrics, and I don't ever see that changing; it may just be in how it's presented and in the flavors of it. I thought Futureprefect was very happy, and yet there was a tinge of sarcasm to the album, because that was the intention of what it was supposed to be about. What was really funny was the amount of people who came to me after Empires was released from major labels. We had a slew of them trying to sign us, saying, 'This is a major label album! It's full of melodic, brilliant, catchy songs!' And I would think, 'Huh. That's funny.' Of Faith, Power and Glory is the same thing. Oddly enough, it's the new favorite being preferred over Judgement. Everybody's got their favorite albums, and I'm like that with any band I like; there's an era I might associate them with, but I still like to listen to modern music and new music, and I've very happy that the album became very successful. It got incredible write-ups in the market today, relatively, you could say, because nobody buys things anymore and they want it now because they're lazy. But comparatively, you could say that this album is probably as successful, which is bizarre for me.

I always thought of it as I was developing a new sound, and that compared to the old stuff would be seen as just an experiment to go off and see if I could do a couple of songs that sound like that. But people associate with Praise the Fallen, Empires, and Futureperfect a certain type of sound that they think VNV should be. The last three albums have had their own sound, and they've all been progressions of each other, and I think the latest has been a huge, massive leap from how Judgement sounded. I wasn't bridled by anything, and I just felt that I would do what I want and what feels good. I enjoyed making every single song and I enjoy listening to it more as an album. I said this about Judgement, but I felt that this album just blew all that away. I felt remarkably proud. I felt that this was an emotional opus. The other thing is those people who say, 'Why aren't VNV angry anymore?' Well, I'm not angry! But those are people who are into a band because of a style and not the substance. VNV is about substance more than anything. Every album is going to have its own sort of vibe and whatever else, and that's important to me, but it's not that all albums should be the same or that all albums should have the same level of aggression. If people want to go and live what it felt like when they were 16 when they first listened to Empires, it's not going to happen here! You're not 16 anymore! Even your perception of the world and music has changed. A lot of people don't get that. But VNV has never been made for the majority. I know that sounds ironic, but it's never been made for the majority. I feel that there has been a core bunch of people that I feel are being spoken to, because they're not people who simply like a kick-ass melody or songs they can dance around to. This is not throwaway music; it never was. I make music that speaks, that says something, and if you want to listen, it's there! Even in the trance instrumentals, there is a lot of thought in it. I wanted to have something a little bit more interesting than a standard old progression that loops over and over, which is what a lot of trance songs are. I used a trance progression that another band had used and sort of said, 'I like the idea, but they just didn't finish it.' So I made it part of another song as a kind of homage, and I heard from the band, and they were totally blown away that I had taken the ball and run with it, but I turned it into a song. They just kept it as a little sequence that looped over and over and that was their song.

You mentioned earlier about not having a label or rather a larger organization backing you, and you are no longer releasing through Metropolis since establishing Anachron. What are your plans for the label as its own entity? So many bands start their own labels simply to release their own music.

Harris: I think that's all we have time for. There have been thoughts of adding bands and seeing what happens with that. There were some larger bands that really wanted to avail of what we get out of our distribution deal. There are a lot of opportunities afforded to us that aren't available to others. Dave from Metropolis and I had a long talk about this, and he knew that his bands will always be labeled as goth bands by the outside world, and as far as I'm concerned, I don't want to be restricted, but I don't want to walk away, if you understand what I mean. I want to continue doing what we do, but I want to do it without the external label. I also want to know that if there are other possibilities available to us, they can open doors and that we can play on more alternative radio without those hindrances of calling us something. We can do that! 'The Great Divide' is being played on quite a lot of radio in America. It's really bizarre. We did a radio version, sent it out to a ton of stations, and they all started playing it; they didn't even question it. AllMusic wrote an incredible review about it. It's what people in the outside world associate with you. It's not just us, but there could be about a dozen bands in the scene who had the potential and songs so powerful that a lot of people – and I'm not talking about mainstream – from all sorts of alternative backgrounds could have heard this and really gotten something out of this. 'Illusion' on YouTube has 2.7 million views. So we paired it together with a video that a guy did, and it's a beautiful video, but the video had something like six million views, and our version with 'Illusion' got that many. Normally when you have another version of something, it doesn't get that many views, but this is getting 2.7 million views with people saying, 'I love this song!' That is a beautiful thing. It shows that there are a lot of people out there who are starting to listen. Obviously, it's a very easy listening song, but there are a lot of people out there now listening to other VNV tracks and thinking, 'Where can I get this music,' because they've never had a chance to hear it. Why should anybody deny them this music? Dave at Metropolis has been trying for years to get his bands broken out, publicized and situated. Instead, too much outside the scene sees this as, 'Oh, they're just the Halloween bands who dress in black and look like freaks 365 days a year.' It doesn't mean that we all want to go mainstream; we don't want to change what we do. We just want to be heard! Dave and I had a long talk about it, and he totally understood my reasoning for it. It's a risk, and I have to do it because I'll never know unless I do it, and I've always been like that to take a risk and see where it lands, and somehow, it's always worked out.

Considering now that it's been 13 years since Praise the Fallen was released, and it's two years away from 2012, and that film came out...

Harris: Which was awful! That movie was awful!

But people are associating some importance to the date and such. So with January 2012 coming up in less than two years, what are your thoughts on it?

Harris: The 2012 on the album cover had nothing to do with what people are going on about now, and I wrote that in Reformation. At the time, the date had no special meaning, no supernatural significance; I just picked a date that I wanted to use as the background context for the original storyline behind the album. It really only started to kick in during the early part of the 2000s, because people always look for an end year. Religion is always looking for that, and Christianity went mad in the '90s with the Rapture and the second return and all that crap. People always look for some date that they believe is going to be. Conveniently enough, it's supposed to be winter solstice or sometime in 2012 when some planet is supposed to magically pass through our solar system. The Mayan calendar doesn't actually end in 2012! It's a complete misnomer. We hear this in pulp reports that all this shit means something. You can pick any date and find a whole bunch of influences that will basically give you the idea that something's going to happen. It doesn't mean anything is going to happen! People thought the world was going to end on the first of January because of the Y2K bug.

There was a Far Side comic of a man on December 31, 1999 holding a sign that read 'The world will end tomorrow.' And then on January 2, 2000, the same man is holding a sign that reads 'The world ended yesterday.'

Harris: Yeah! There were a couple of computers that had problems, and that was it! Somebody had written a book about 2012 back in 2003, and his ideas got jumped on even though he was completely wrong; they've now forwarded the date another five years so we can say, 'Oh, the world's going to end in five more years.'

They do that with movies. There has been an announcement to remake Escape from New York because the original is date is long past.

Harris: Oh, that's a bad idea! The movie in itself was a vision of a dark future of cities being so far out of control that we have to wall them off. Wow, we're kind of living there now, aren't we? It's a scary thing about the late '70s bad sci-fi movies, or even the good ones like Blade Runner, which was visionary. But the really bad ones like Bronx Warriors, and B-movies about after the fall of mankind and driving around like in Mad Max, driving Dodge Chargers around.

Imagine driving around with twin 0.50 caliber machine guns mounted on your hood.

Harris: Hey! Who doesn't have one of those these days? Apple will make one: the iGun. [Laughs.]

But anyway, people will draw all kinds of significance for dates. 2012 is a nice date, and one of the cycles of the Mayan calendar does end on that date, and people are starting to believe that a planet with a huge orbital path around the sun is coming because it's mentioned in ancient Sumerian texts, and it's associated with the gods and blah, blah, blah. People are basically taking facts – very, very vague facts – or old ancient tales, and running with them.

Nostradamus.

Harris: Yeah, he was saying 1999 was the big bad one that was going to do us all in. But then again, nobody's ever gotten his interpretations right. I think the wars they got right, but seriously, when have we ever lived in a time when there wasn't some major war going on? And you as Americans will try to change things and you'll hope for things that you can change, but you seem to try to get them done by politicians who seem to act out of their own interests, so you have a country where you have a democratic dictatorship.

Pretty much; it's so true. We had once spoken about Front 242's P.U.L.S.E. and how it unfortunately became somewhat discarded after the critical praise that seemed to indicate that the album would change the face of EBM, the genre they helped create. Now that band does more updated versions of older songs instead of incorporating newer material. Even Apoptygma Berzerk has gone done an indie rock path, so as far as the bands from your generation or rather your style and when you came onto the scene, what are your thoughts on the new styles of these bands?

Harris: Well, I know Front 242 well, and I know that the concept behind P.U.L.S.E. was to go back to a '70s approach of making music, which was quite adventurous for them. But they said, 'Well, what else is there left for us to do? We've already proven everything. Let's just have fun making music.' They're not going to change what they do just for the sake of popularity, and I think that's very noble of them. Stephan (Groth)...well...likes other music, and he changed Apoptygma accordingly. I kind of thought he would've done better with the side project, but OK. Whatever the single was called, I think it was 'Apollo,' and that was the closest he had come to bridging the two sounds. But he just got into this sort of music, and he just wanted to, I suppose, envelop himself in it, so he jumped off to a major label in Europe, which did OK for him. He really kind of lost a lot of the appeal that he had for his fans, and that was unfortunate, but they did a tour recently in Germany that was packed out, because people went out to see them for the old songs. Nobody wanted to hear the new songs. From the point of view of people in the 'dark scene,' as they call it in Germany, they've got no point of reference with all this indie music. They don't listen to it. I remember doing an interview in 2005, and I needed to use a point of reference to explain this indie influence, and I said, 'Oh, you know, it's like all these bands!' And so I named a bunch of bands, and I named The Killers, and this interviewer for a major press magazine in Germany says to me, 'What's The Killers?' This is in 2005! That's pretty sad! But that's just to give you an idea as far as the reference points for these people, so they thought the new album that Apop put out sounded like Bon Jovi to them. They're sticking to their guns and they're doing what they love. I still think Stephan is an amazing songwriter without a doubt, and whatever people's opinions of it are, it's not always going to stay the same thing forever. It can't! Otherwise, it just ends up becoming boring. Too many bands that have done that have lost everything because they've become a monotonous repetition.