Bohren & Der Club Of Gore

CHINO MORENO (DEFTONES/TEAM SLEEP)
I was looking at your Ipecac website the other day and was overwhelmed by how many great artists you’ve taken under your wing and put out on the label. For instance, this German, down tempo, dark jazz group called Bohren & Der Club of Gore; I had no idea anybody really even knew about this band. They’re so far removed from anything that’s popular about music today. How did you find them?

MIKE PATTON
“I was on tour with Tomahawk in Malmö, Sweden – completely bored, walking around a strange town, just me and the bassplayer Kevin [Rutmanis], and we see this funny looking shop called the Scandinavian Heavy Metal Exchange, or something like that, and thought ‘well, we’ve gotta go in here’. We walk in and – I shit you not – the guy behind the counter is wearing corpse paint, like [deep voice] ‘Welcome!’

"So we’re just looking around, trying not to laugh – thinking ‘wow, so this is Sweden, I guess they take that stuff seriously up here, hmm’ – when we hear one of Bohren & Der Club of Gore’s old records playing. We were looking sat each other, like ‘what the fuck is this? Could this guy seriously be playing something like that?’ Finally, we get the courage up to ask. He shows us the record and I say ‘well, man, I’ll take one and he’ll take one’. He says’ no, we don’t sell it’, and I say ‘what are you playing it for then, man?’ It became a quest for us to find out more about this group. We did, we got really lucky and were able to work with them.”

You can read more questions from Massive Attack, Postishead, Dillinger Escape Plan etc and Mike's answers here. This is how interviews should be like.