In a massive interview about EBM I now made a few years ago you claimed EBM to you is ‘attitude and passion’. Can you give us a bit more details and especially about the ‘attitude’? Do you see it a different way today? No, nothing changed since we answered your question. It’s a special kind of powerful and energetic electronic dance music, which needs to be done with ‘attitude and passion’. If we link these words to NZ and our own standards we always try to do it with attitude and passion to get the results we want to achieve. I think we are our own main critics with a high effort to fulfill our own demands. That’s our attitude! Things went really fast for NZ. You released 3 official EP’s from 2014 till 2015 on Emmo.biz featuring a total amount of 14 songs. The EP’s got released next as a collector’s box CD edition in 2015, but we next had to wait till 2019 to get you back with new work. How do you look back at your early work and what explains this silence till the “One Of Us”-album? We look back at this early work in a very positive way, because all things worked very well for us after releasing our EPs. But the release of our “Raw And Pure – Aggressions – Against You!”-trilogy was just the first step we did; followed by a lot of things we worked on since 2015. After getting booked to play live at bigger festivals like “WGT” and “Bodyfest” we needed to work on and prepare our live performance. Additionally we did some quite nice remix works for great bands like Die Krupps, Nitzer Ebb, Sarah Noxx, Orange Sector, Alien Vampires, Amnistia and Trilogy. In 2017 the end of our former label Emmo.biz caused also a longer break in our planned timetable to release “One Of Us” by the need to search for a new label. So there was less silence than people may expect. I heard from Orange Sector they put you in touch with Infacted Recordings. How did it really happen and tell us something more about your ‘relation/friendship’ with Orange Sector? And is there something like an EBM community? What are your experiences thus far? As a part of the scene and playing live on stage at some festivals it’s pretty normal to get in touch with other bands. Already from our beginning at Emmo.biz Records, Martin from Orange Sector liked our music and at the “E-Only”-festival in Leipzig in 2017 we had the possibility to meet him in person. At this time we already knew that Emmo.biz would stop its activities and so we had to find another label. So what’s easier than talking to other bands and asking them about their own experiences? At the end of 2018 we met Martin again and he told us only good things about Torben Schmidt’s label Infacted Recordings. And yes, it was Martin who put us in touch with Torben. We - 27 - are really grateful therefore. And now we are a part of Infacted Recordings beside Orange Sector and a lot of other fantastic bands and artists. In general it’s always good to get in touch with other bands and artists within and outside the scene. We made a lot of great friendships over the past years. We are grateful therefore too. You clearly pay some importance to the artwork of your releases, which reveal some uniformity and artistic sobriety. Here again it’s easy to make a link with early Nitzer Ebb artwork while the colors you’re using might remind some historic propaganda. What can you tell us about the artwork and its meaning? If people think we just wanted to remind some historic propaganda with the chosen colors, they are on a totally wrong way. The whole story started we wanted to get the artwork fitting to our music; minimalist, reduced and simplified as possible just like our songs. ‘What you see is what you get’ was the intension. First we thought about just using black and white but then there was something missing. It wasn’t intense and strong enough, as we wanted. So the color red was the perfect addition. To use it as a signal color. Red means danger and red is an aggressive and powerful opposite to black and white. The combination of these three colors fits that perfectly to our concept to release three EP’s by varying these colors. We didn’t want to use any additional symbols or something else. So we put the colors and ‘NZ’ in the focus of our artwork. Yes, it’s easy to make the link to Nitzer Ebb’s imagery –and that’s okay. Influences? Yes, of course! What you see is what you get. Perfect! But in our opinion that’s much too easy considering the whole artworkconcept we did for the three EP’s and the album. Our second choice was orange, but do you think we could do that? (lol) Maybe it’s not the best property within the scene to compare everything new with something old and characterize it just by that. It’s lousy and boring to discuss about that. It makes people blind for new things. They should be more open-minded regarding new bands who created something with ‘attitude and passion’. It’s not needed to compare everything, but it’s needed to listen to. In general there should be more curiosity and respect, especially between people who like the same things or same music. We do what we like and we will not change that. Thank you for this interview! And cheers to all of our fans out there! You are ‘One Of Us’! www.facebook.com/NZ.propaganda Stef COLDHEART Photos © Benny Serneels www.peek-a-boo-magazine.be
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