You’ve released about 14 albums so far. Is there one of them which you are particularly proud of ? If there is then why ?
(Hugo Race) I don't actually listen to my old albums. Pretty much as soon as the mix is done I feel its mission accomplished, with a certain sadness to let the songs go and at the same time a sense of relief that its over. My earlier records I avoid listening to totally because it sounds like somebody else. I guess thats what happens as you grow up in public. But I'm aware of the stories behind each album, of the context in which songs were created and recorded. Because the True Spirit has always recorded guerrilla-style in borrowed or hand-built studios on the road in various locations with shifting line-ups and rarely the same engineer for tracking and mixes, we produced a series of cut-ups which reflect specific places and times. The albums for me are time-capsules, full of memories and free association. My songs, on the other hand, have a life of their own and multiple identities depending on if they're rendered solo or with one of the various Spirit line-ups, or by another project such as Sepiatone. I don't know about being proud of anything - its more I know it when i actually managed to get something right, and not flinch away from letting the words say what I really meant to say. My favourite records are always the recent releases, unsurprisingly, Ambuscado - Sepiatone's Dark Summer - Taoist Priests. The record that haunts me from the 90s is the Last Frontier, its pretty lo-fi in some ways but the stories behind it run pretty deep.

During the years your voice became deeper and more thoughtful, in your latest album it even reminds me a little of Mark Lanegan. Do you smoke a lot ?
(H.R.) Ha! There can be a connection between heavy smoking and deep/slash/thoughtful male voices, although not necessarily... I mean, it doesn't necessarily work that way. I'm not a heavy smoker, and it's my opinion that your voice, like your body, changes during your lifetime depending on how you feed it and what you do with it. After years of living in my voice it's expanded and it reflects more about who I really am than it could before - your voice is the expression of your soul. If you're afraid to be who you are, your voice will never manifest.

Is there actually a religious inspiration behind “Taoist Priests” ?
(H.R.) Where to start answering this question? There's a spiritualized background to everything we do... but getting down to basics, I'd say there's a religious/spiritual root to just about everything that exists and rock 'n roll music is a case in point. On the Ambuscado album we revisit gospel and transcendental electronica and take it deep into the mystic. On Taoist Priests we keep going and find religion as a political weapon in the new millenial world war. In other words: we are spiritualists (True Spirit) exploding the tight-assed structures of conventional religion by calling its bluff and resurrecting the roots. Taoist Priests as a title concept arrived from two different directions that are really flip sides of the same coin: Taoism as the way of balance (in a world of paradox and extremes) and the Taoist Priest as an illegal firework different only in scale from the rockets we watch raining down in the nightly newscasts. The True Spirit is a group of musicians who grew up together and play with cosmic ideas and dark humour the way other bands mess around with guitar riffs.

Album after album your music became more atmospheric from an instrumental point of view. For example, Ambuscado and Taoist Priests sound quite ‘dilated’, if you know what I mean. Did the composition of soundtracks have an influence on that ?
(H.R.) Well,kind of. Actually we started fooling with what you call dilation back in '95 on an album called Wet Dream which is semi-instrumental and largely hand-made (its the last we did splicing analogue tape!) Our indecision was about delivering records that we thought our audience wanted to hear and our record company wanted to release. With records like Chemical Wedding and Last Frontier we managed to alienate some people because we were exploring new territories. But we didn't go far enough! So I went off and developed so-called visionary music through projects like Transfargo and the Merola Matrix. And doing that, I found my mentality sort of transformed to a point of no return. So when I started writing what became the Goldstreet Sessions i already could hear where the band had to go sonically with songs like "Is Your Love Strong" and "Ramacca"... And well, we found people were really digging where we were coming from. Either we were ahead of our time in the 90s or we lacked the courage of our convictions and had to learn the hard way to trust our intuition.

What’s the role of the True Spirit in the songwriting ? Do you usually write everything yourself or does your band give an important contribution ? Do they have a great influence on the way your records sound ?
(H.R.) I don't write with the band normally. I write alone and from the point of view of writing a song that I can stand up and play alone - I've been doing solo concerts for twenty years and have to say that playing live and solo influenced my music and words profoundly. Because theres nowhere to run and no one to hide behind. You know your shit and you've thought it through or you don't. Basically, thats how i found out how much i didn't know. The musicians in the True Spirit are not casual acquaintances of mine - they're all close personal friends and I listen seriously to what they say about my songs. And when we get together, I try not to interfere with what they do. To a certain point, the Spirit is a free-will zone for the band, I don't tell them what to play. Michelangelo Russo, Chris Hughes and Bryan Colechin all have a big impact on how the records sound, and also as to what gets selected from my writing for the albums. But you know, theres a lot of unspoken common ground between all of us, and it relates to our shared history and aesthetics, not to mention our politics and sense of humour. We're a band, but we're not at all typical - in a way, we're probably more like a gang in some ways. We've got our own codes, ethics, reasons and motives and this is something that evolved over two decades.

Between the releases of “Ambuscado” and “Taoist Priests” there’s just a four mopnths gap. Was that because you had a lot of songs left off from “Ambuscado” or were you in a very creative mood and wrote many new songs in such a short time ?
(H.R.) Its because Ambuscado is based on a collection of pre-existing recordings from the Spirit archive that stretch back to 1989, so we added new tracks and overdubs and generally cooked up an acid gumbo over a period of twelve months. During that time, i was writing what became Taoist Priests. But I didn't write anything specifically for Ambuscado; instead there was free-association and perverse experiment going on in that particular kitchen. Hughes was sending me electronic drum tracks, Colechin was researching in the archive and Russo was getting deeper into sonic experimentation. My role was more to sculpt all this into a cryptic spiritualistic headmovie. Conversely, with Taoist Priests I was writing a song collection and when they were ready we nailed the actual recording and mix in about 8 weeks, which for us is record speed!

In 2004 you released “The Merola Matrix”, a very atypical album in which you manipulated a bunch of old Mario Merola’s songs: how did that idea come about ?
(H.R.) I mentioned before about a point i came to with rock music where it wasn't doing it for me anymore so i shot off in tangents developing new sounds and ideas. This was around '99, after the Last Frontier. What it involved was spontaneous sound sculptures using radios and pre-recorded loops mixed live with a lot of space for freak accident and synchronicity to kick in; this was in fact how "Helixed" started. So I was doing this over a sound system in an art squat in Palermo, in the heart of the Vucciria, and some of the local guys came to see me about pumping these sounds into the neighbourhood... They were cool enough to loan me some Merola cassettes because they didn't like my stuff and wanted to turn me onto some real music... Well, i started mixing Merola into the casserole and realised immediately that not only did it sound good, but it resonated on many levels with my experience of southern Italy. Its still mutating...

I think you didn't shoot many videos for your songs: is that because you don't like doing them very much or you simply didn't have the chance ?
(H.R.) For a while we couldnt be bothered. We're not a commercial mass-appeal band and the opportunities for broadcast are slim. Then Nico Mansy from the Spirit got interested in video and shot the "Ghosting the Cities" roadmovie while we were on the Long Time Ago tour in central europe - (you can download that movie and all our other videos from YouTube, by the way). Then Nico edited two Goldstreet videos for "A.M.Radio" and "LSD is Dead" from films shot by Chris Hughes, Bob King and Hellcat of the band in Berlin, Melbourne and Prague. So we were getting re-interested. Bryan Colechin has edited 3 videos from "Taoist Priests" so far, and theres a lot more material in the can but just not enough time to cut it all! Meantime, we're looking at releasing a DVD of Taoist Priests at the end of this year.

Do you still get questioned a lot about your times with the Bad Seeds ? Does people still look at you as ‘one of the Bad Seeds’ sometimes ?
(H.R.) You know, people are very curious about that, and thats cool because it was my experience of both pleasure and pain to have been there in the beginning of Nick Cave: Man or Myth (as the Bad Seeds were first called...) Nick and the Birthday Party are, like me, from Melbourne, from the same small radical scene there and with a lot of similar influences. It's funny because the connection goes back a lifetime and although I can see it means a lot to other people, to me its more just like family. I watch how people try to figure me out and figure my age, as in well, he was with the Seeds on tour in the U.S. in '84 and since then he's done x, y and z and how is this possible? The point is I started working with Nick when i was a baby! Makes me laugh.

You collaborated with many important artists during the years: are there any collaboration you still remember with particular pleasure ?
(H.R.) Some definite highlights: Mick Harvey joining my first real band Plays with Marionettes in Melbourne '81 after we had to kick out the original drummer; in the London studio with Blixa Bargeld for the recording of Cave's "Box for Black Paul"; jamming Rue Morgue Blues with Alex Hacke at the Berlin Loft club in '89; recording "Guns 'n Ammo" with Nikki Sudden in Berlin; singing "Lost" with Marta Collica in a Sicilian studio for the Last Frontier; presenting Transfargo with Dimitri de Perrot at the Ton Art festival in Bern 2000 after two week's recording only broken up by the World Cup; working on Cesare Basile's Closet Meraviglia one dark Catania winter when Roy Paci walks in through the door; Giovanni Ferrario writing the bass line to Hush Money in Droge's basement studio in the old Berlin Gestapo headquarters; recording an English/Arabic duet with Faisal from Dounia in Sicilia 03; getting snowbound in Milan and ending up by accident taping guitar on Afterhour's Hyenas album; hanging out with Roberto Binda in the Satanic fogs beyond Malpensa airport; Robert Forster's theory of the perfect song; Bambi Lee Savage's "Demon Alcohol" at the old Preussenton studio; Tony Cohen working on the mix of "Valley of Light"; the John Parish Copenhagen sessions in 04; the studio debut of my daughter singing backing vocals on Taoist Priests!

You played many times in Italy during your 2006 tour, but those dates didn’t get all the promotion they deserved, so many people couldn’t show up at the concerts simply because they didn’t know you were playing. Do you think you’ll be able to get more accurate promotion when you’ll come back here on tour ?
(H.R.) I would certainly hope so. I know there were some problems, on the independent level of the music industry there usually are.... if people want to know whats going on with us next, tune in to our our websites: www.helixed.net e www.myspace.com/hugoraceandthetruespirit

Tiziana Brombin