NZ I discovered the Austrian NZ-duo a few years ago. The band got signed on the now defunct Emmo.biz Records and released the impressive EP-trilogy “Aggressions”, “Raw And Pure” and “Against You”. Daniel and Jürgen are dealing with old-school EBM, which is reminding some of the Masters in the genre. NZ last year joined hands together with Infacted Recordings and unleashed the album “One Of Us”. This work features reworked songs from the EP’s plus a small amount of new tracks. “One Of Us” is without a shadow of a doubt one of the best EBM albums from the past year while NZ is for sure one of the most talented projects in their music genre. I’d a chat with both protagonists. First things first, how did you guys meet and tell us a bit more about your music background, the way you got contaminated by the EBM virus, the name NZ and Nitzer Ebb, which appears to be an important source of inspiration? We know each other for a long time and of course electronic based music was and is our common passion. We met as teenagers at the most famous underground club in town. We were not really friends from the beginning. But electronic music brought us together when we realized we like the same things. This aspect was definitely the reason for the start of our friendship and our project NZ. It was this development from music consumers through music presenters to music creators. We didn’t live in the same area, but we both started DJ’ing and organizing parties apart from each other. We wanted to present to the people that kind of electronic music we liked. And of course we started to know us better after a while. www.peek-a-boo-magazine.be - 26 - Sometime in the 90’s we decided to start making music by our own and of course at this time Nitzer Ebb was an inspiration as other bands like DAF or Laibach. We had a very experimental approach using some old analogue vintage synthesizers and samplers. It was indeed a really good time to explore and discover everything around our own demands without having plans to publish or release something. It was just for fun and just for us. Yes, the name… We guess for a band it’s always difficult to find a name that fits. And it really took us quite a long time until we found ours. The search for the band name started before we even knew we would release something. And the name changed during this period a few times. Finally it was a coincidence. When Daniel went to the school of arts and crafts he created a logo as a design study based on a local newspaper called “Neue Zeit”. After years he found this NZ-logo again and with its simplicity, minimalism, reduction and deconstruction it seemed to be a good visual example for the style of our music. So we tried to find a fitting name with an “N” and a “Z”. But all the names we tried to create felt a bit artificial and factitious. At least it was Jürgen’s suggestion to keep it simple and just to take the “NZ” as the name. And that made absolutely sense with its simplicity, minimalism and reduction -so the name NZ was born. We had a lot of inspiration during our search for the right sound of our music. But finally in best case you produce the music you like if you take it serious. For us Nitzer Ebb was always more than just a band. We see Nitzer Ebb as a specific style of music with its minimalistic, but strong and aggressive sound and this is the music we like.
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