Despite their refusal to be compared with legendary NASUM: GADGET are close to the brilliance of the now-gone swedish giants of grind. Drummer William was annoyed by this topic but despite that turned out to be a very calm and nice interview partner who showed a dry sense of humor. Some days after the record-relase show of "Funeral March” he nailed down his answers. Here we go… Interview You had your release party some days ago - how was it? Did a lot
of fans show up?

The releaseparty was increadable! The place was packed full. The downside of having a full room and also a very enthustiastic audience is that all the air seems to disappear... It´s quite a small venue and a really small stage. I was melting away, almost through up over the drums. Haha.

We also did a "second party" this weekend in a more D.I.Y. manner... It was really booked as a party for our friend Greg Alexander (Relapse US) who was visiting us for the weekend, but it feels good to have a show in connection to the releaseparty, where the younger audience can come. When you do a releaseparty on a pub there are a lot of people who haven´t turned 18 yet who miss out, so it feels fair to them to do a sencond gig.

One week before you played at the Fuck The Commerce festival for the
first time. What are you memories of it? Did you stay there for longer or
leave after your gig?

Fuck The Commerce was a quite nice festival, even though it´s repurtation obviously exceeded this years reality. As far as I understood, it has been a really big festival, so I was a bit surprised when we got there. The organizers treated us well though, and our gig was good, so we where generally happy. The only two bad parts where that a lot of bands we wanted to see cancelled. There really seemed to be a lot of trouble with the line-up. Second, we had to stay at the festival for one extra day after the gig. It was probably the longest day in my personal history. We just stayed in bed all day and waited until we could go to sleep again. We left for sweden the day after.

Do you prefer club gigs or festival shows?

I like playing festivals, and for us right now it´s a great opportunity to reach new audience and meet new people. The festivals we´ve done so far have been a lot of traveling for just one gig though, as in going from sweden to france, or germany, and then home again, but I try to look at it as work, and that it´s worth it.

Even so, I think I prefer to play club gigs... at least I enjoy those more when I´m on stage, and the fact that there´s usually less logistical problems with those.

Some people say you´re the legitimate successors of nasum. can you agree
with that?

I think it´s weired that people assume that we have been in a contest with Nasum, or that we might have been selling less records before, only because Nasum where around. It´s not like people had to choose between our albums and Nasums albums. If anything, they paved the way for this second coming of grindcore, so we owe a lot of our success to them.

It took nearly two years to have "The Funeral March" released - did you
need so much time for writing the songs?

Nah, it took us about 6 months to get the material in order, but we had a long period when we almost did nothing. It felt weird, as if we where stuck in neutral-gear. We did a few stray-gigs only because we where offered to play, but didn´t really do anything.

Looking back, I guess it had a lot to do with the fact that we were not really satisfyed with remote, even after putting so much effort and expectations into it, and then when nothing happened after the release, we got stuck.

Where did you record the album? how long did you stay at the studio?

We recorded it in my studio, called the Overlook, and it was ment to be a 3 week process, but became almost 4. After we had the drums tracked + one of the guitars, we had a harddrive break-down. Actually we had two(!) harddrive-breakdowns so we actually lost both the recording-drive and the backup-drive. Haha... luckally we got the first drive fixed and could continue working from where we left off.

The cover art is different from the one used on "Remote", having more
details and a different approach. Why did you chose it? Who created it?

It was made by Orion Landau who works for Relapse... he is the man! He basically got free hands, but in the beginning when we started discussing the layout, it was really obvious his ideas where synchronized with all our expectations. The only part of the layout we actually discussed was the actual cover. Some of the band-members where not so keen on it at start, but I think all of us are really happy about the whole layout as it came down in the end.

What are the lyrics on "the funeral march" about?

They are mostly semi-depressing lyrics about the decay that follows our culture... how everything is allways becoming more. How violence and sex is becoming such a big part of our society. Less is more. I wish I was born in the 1950s.
Do you have any plans for more recordings, like a split-ep?

We have plans to get qoing with new material at least, but doing a split-ep doesn´t appeal to me personally... I like doing albums. Hehe. At times we have talked about doing splits but it never seems to happen. We´ll just have to wait and see.

And what´s up with Withered Beauty?

Good question! Hahaha... I left a couple of years ago since nothing ever happened. The others kept playing but I think the whole project is more or less put to rest. They have other projects "on the go" so they probably need that energy for thoose. You should check out Undivine and Isole if you are interested.

And some final words?

Thanks for doing this interview with me! And sorry for keeping you waiting for the answers... I´m now off to rehearse with my new project called "Stuka-party"... look for us on myspace in the future. =)