Ocean Dust (Belgium) – Interview – Thanks for Asking! – by Liam Sweeny.
RRX: Like songs, every artist has a unique feeling about their first show. What was your first show like? Was it your best show? If not, what was your best show like?
OD: Our very first show was special… and challenging… Very challenging!
Let me explain: in the beginning, Ocean Dust was just our percussionist Bart and me (Rutger). We started to mess around with FL Studio and a couple of synths in our home studio (if you can call it that). So, there was no live band at all. We never even thought about it, at that point.
However, not far from our hometown, there was a festival. Bart knew their music programmer. Not thinking that his actions would have any consequences, he decided to send him our demo with our early compositions. Bart also told him that we had a full band, and bragged that we already had a lot of live experience.
Apparently, his ballsy approach had success, because it turned out that the music programmer loved our demo CD and believed Barts story about our so-called live experience. The result was that he gave us our first gig. Not in some crappy bar, but on an actual festival.
However, a problem occurred: we didn’t have a band and had only about two months to form one. We’ve managed to bring the right people on board in just a couple of weeks. And for one month, we’ve practiced our asses off. Before the gig, the stress was killing us, but we’ve pulled it off. The gig turned out to be a great experience, and no one in the audience ever realized that we had never been on a stage before. So, no guts, no glory, I guess!
RRX: Love is a big part of music. We’re talking first loves here. Lots of cool stories about first loves and the things we do for those loves. Can you (or, in the case of a band, one member) talk about your first love, especially if you did something cool to express that love? (No names needed.)
OD: We have a punk rock song with baroque influences, a little bit different than our other songs. When you listen to it, it’s like Blink-182 meets Vampire Weekend with some U2 sprinkled on top of it. I made it with Bart on a really hot summer day. We decided to write about a long-lost summer love. Bart once briefly dated a girl with a really big bum. After a couple of beers, that became the subject of the song. I won’t go into details, but when you read between the lines, the song is really cheeky and dirty. Bart never wanted to tell whether he made those things up or not. So, that will always remain a mystery in the band. Anyway, we’ve kept the lyrics, even though they’re a bit goofy, but they fit perfectly with the fresh, summery melodies. We’ve professionally recorded the song last year, and it will be published somewhere in 2025. So, stay tuned!
RRX: Playing out is tricky because you never know what’s going to happen when you get there. Sometimes everything goes wrong. What was your worst show like?
OD: Our worst, yet very memorable show was the result of a miscasting of our band. We were booked on an indie festival, or at least, so we thought. When we arrived, it turned out to be a hip-hop gig. The room was full of stoned, Snoop Dogg-like, dreaded guys. Don’t get us wrong, we love hip-hop, and Snoop, but, no one can rap in the band. So, we felt quite out of place there.
On top of that, the mics weren’t working properly, and because we already had a gig earlier in the same evening, our (female) singer had lost her voice. So, I (Rutger) took over, I kind of shouted the lyrics and we played our songs faster than ever before. The Sex Pistols would have been proud, I think. But the audience seemed to love it, and they went along with it. In the end, we gave a pretty decent and very rock and roll performance. And… we discovered that a hip-hop crowd can be pretty open-minded!
RRX: Our style comes from the extension of our influences. It’s like an evolution. We’re influenced, and it inspires us to influence. What can you say about your influences, and what you feel you’ve done with their influence as a musician or band? Have you extended their work?
OD: We make dance music with an indie vibe. It is up-tempo and often sounds happy and summerly. This stands in stark contrast with our metal, punk or rock background. If you listen to our music, you would probably not guess that. This, however, is not the case when you listen to our lyrics more carefully. We have ostensibly ‘happy’ songs with rather dark or socially critical lyrics that have more in common with rock than dance.
Although we have our difference in terms of music taste, we all share a big love for indie music from the 80s. We all love bands like The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Felt, Joy Division… What those bands have in common is their sense for amazing melodies. You’ll find that melodic aspect in our music as well.
Our songs often contain multiple melody lines that float together towards the end. Music nowadays is less melodic, in my opinion, and that’s a shame. In our latest song, I Will Always Wait, I add a guitar solo in the end, which is vintage Johnny Marr. A dance song with a Smiths-like guitar solo sounds really odd on paper, but it works, and I am really proud of that.
RRX: With services like Spotify, streaming revenue can be pretty dismal. Without spilling secrets, do you have a promotional mindset or philosophy?
OD: We miss the days that we could just record a demo on a cassette or CD-R, and that was good enough to get you somewhere. Nowadays, because of Spotify, you already need a ready-made product, perfectly mixed and mastered. So, we absolutely miss the 90s and early 00s. But, it is impossible to ignore Spotify and all the other streaming channels. So, we try to compensate it by being extra creative.
For our previous song, “Two-Faced Girl” for instance we’ve made a videoclip with cosplayers. On the recording day we invited 20 cosplayers in the craziest costumes – ranging from manga girls to Star Wars dudes, and even one larger-than-life, crazy-ass robot.
The shoot was really cool. But the coolest thing was their stories. When the masks went off, we’ve talked to all of them, and they all had their reasons to do cosplay. For some it was a way to escape bullying, while for others it was a way to compensate for their dull and meaningless daily life. It gives them an opportunity to be someone else. We decided to film their stories. So, the video clip became an entire story-telling project, which is really nice. Those extra videos did very well on social media. So, we really liked that kind of marketing. Storytelling is something that we will re-use in future Ocean Dust projects.
RRX: Let’s talk about your next project, your next few. Just not the ones you’re working on now. The ones you have your eyes on for the future. What’s coming to us?
OD: We’ve (professionally) recorded and published six songs right now. We will keep on doing that in 2025. As I’ve mentioned in this interview, we have recorded a song with punk rock vibes, called ‘Sunkissed’. We have started a little side project called ‘Sirens Not Mermaids’, which will be more rock/guitar based. So, as it would not fit in with the other songs, we won’t publish ‘Sunkissed’ under the Ocean Dust moniker.
We will of course continue with Ocean Dust too. We’re working on two songs right now with the working titles ‘Tangled in Delight’ and ‘The Time is Right’. The first one is almost entirely recorded. It is about people’s penchant for superficial desires, so it is a socially critical song. The other one, ‘The Time is Right’, is about euthanasia. The lyrics were written by a friend and singer of ours. She is a doctor and wrote the lyrics after she had to perform euthanasia on a patient. Lyrically speaking, it is a very heavy song. So, after all, maybe our metal and punk backgrounds play a bigger role in the band than we thought. For both songs we have some crazy video ideas in mind…
And since we all love crazy, we’ll probably have a lot of work on our hands next year. But we’re happy to have some great opportunities ahead of us and we’re incredibly excited to find out what 2025 has in store for us!
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/
Youtube: www.youtube.com/channel/
