I FASK
I followed the FASK (acronym for “Fast Animals and Slow Kids”) in their dressing rooms, and I poured my curiosity on them after listening to their new album “It’s already tomorrow”.
A good story that you carry in your pocket, from your past?
We went to play in a rather strange place (smiles), there were twenty people, maybe fewer, keep in mind that some of those people hated us (laughs). That day it was also raining on the stage. We finished the concert and asked where we would go to sleep, at the time we always slept in the house of whoever made us play. Their response was this: “You sleep here, because there is a Judo gym downstairs”. And the floor below was really a Judo gym with tatami mats, and we slept there, on top of the mats. And the “interesting” thing is that our bathroom was the same as where the twenty people in the audience had been in the evening. As I left, I remember they locked us in, with the promise that they would come and pick us up the next day. At that point we realized that it was still a “club”, so there was some beer in it, and we ended up getting a little drunk, and a little tipsy, we turned the system back on and started to put our saddest songs, I remember for example we put the Notwist. From there a chat started between us, a tipsy and mega emotional chat, where we told each other, confiding in each other the worst parts of our lives. Everyone has a particularly dark part within them. But we pulled them out, crying, in this club – locked inside! – as we wondered if music would ever be part of our future, because “look where we are, look what’s happening”. And then we fell asleep like that, side by side on the tatami mats. The point is that we reacted to that situation by uniting with each other even more, and therefore: what we carry in our pockets from the past is our friendship.
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In “Stupid Song” you sing “I have no dreams, I do not produce, I have not been in the military”. It is a piece that talks about growing up, and also about the search for oneself, for one’s place in the world.
It certainly is, because part of existing is looking for a place of one’s own, a place to feel good, to exist, a search that we have not yet completed one hundred percent.
And therefore it is also a record about the passing of time. So I take the leap to ask you how the last two years have gone by for you.
We have felt a bit useless, in these two years, because music is perhaps one of the things at least apparently less indispensable. In addition, it was not easy because we also experienced very heavy personal situations. And so this certainly heightened a sense of loneliness which then exploded again in the lyrics and in the songs, but in a positive sense, as always happens with music. Because through the music you partly process the black you have inside, the darkness, the evil you feel, the darkness. You process it, you put it into the songs, and then you partially take it away from you.
The feeling is that the album has its own circularity. And time, as you mentioned at the beginning, is one of the characteristics of the album. Is there any philosophy behind it?
In my opinion it is always with the “f” but it is more madness (laughs). We’ve been doing this for a while now: we hide a lot of stuff inside the records, there are little “easter eggs” everywhere, from the graphics to the music itself, and one of the things we like most to do is make the records circular. In this case it begins slowly, with a rain that is light, and ends with a pouring rain; in fact there was also a sense of path that we wanted to give, in this record, because this is a bit like the history of our existence. When we look back, we will not have photos to browse through social networks, we will have discs to put on a plate, or to listen to with our cell phone of the future that scans thoughts (laughs again).
And then it happened that FASK sang like that, improvising in front of me on the dirty sofa in the dressing room, their whole new single. In the video you will find a part of this wonderful gem.
Long live the Fask!
