‘Ding*r’ is the debut full length from Blauer Montag, featuring former founding member Hair & Skin Trading Company, Richard Montag – who recorded the album over a number of years.

Some material dates to 2007 and locations; mainly Govan in Glasgow, Rutherglen and Lochailort in Scotland and Swedish Lapland with location recordings in the Isle of Arran and the Swedish Arctic. Borrowed sound clips hark back to now defunct eras of UK and German culture such as militant anarchist revolution and the German Democratic Republic (DDR). Montag wrote, arranged and mixed the album and even built some of the synths, guitars and equipment used. The album features guests such as longtime friend Kath Gifford (who Richard has known from his Hair & Skin Trading Company days, whilst Kath played with the likes of Stereolab and Snowpony) who provided vocals/lyrics for ‘Mirtazapine Drift’ (originally written by Montag after being prescribed the drug for chronic insomnia) and Gareth McNicol (fellow bandmate of the sometimes active, Hearing Voices Movement) provided additional guitars. Professor Jono Podmore who is a collaborator with Can (supervising their most recent remastering) and co-collaborator with Irmin Schmidt (Kumo) provided mastering. These days Richard is also a mental health nurse and psychological therapist in Glasgow, Scotland, and the album is “bookended by Montag’s favourite Swedish toddler.”

“The album was in some ways almost a compilation album, half the album was created in one process and the other half was coming from different years with different set ups”

How did the project Blauer Montag come about? What is the overall vision of it?

Richard Montag: I guess I had been accumulating a lot of material over the years and when I decided I would look to have some of it released I approached a few places. I had interest from a local label and one in America, but I was particularly keen in having some released on Polytechnic Youth. Dom really liked ‘Klepto’ and generally oriented more towards the guitar stuff of mine he heard and he suggested some other tracks I had to go with it, some of which were pretty much written (the instrumental version of ‘Mirtazapine Drift’ and ‘Entonox Monotrope’ and others more sketchy ‘Geoergiolab’). However Dom said Polytechnic Youth was winding down as Brexit had killed the foreign sales so suggested it could out on Feral Youth. I suppose the overall vision was a lot of homage to all my loves like ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn,’ Conny Plank’s production of DAF, the hypnosis of Neu, the trippiness of Hawkwind, the fuck you to norms of Sonic Youth and Einstürzende Neubauten, obtuse humour of the Orb the vintage gourmet cheese of electronic disco. When the tracks were selected for the album it naturally felt like a product from the 70s- the decade that dominated my childhood, so spinning in some found stuff like adverts from the DDR which are both “funny haha” and “funny strange” and interviews with the Angry Brigade seemed totally in step with the mood.

How much work went into recording your debut album, ‘Ding*r’?

Well there’s a question in a half. There are actually two versions of the album that got mixed and mastered and got rejected by Dom. The first version, I kind of went off on a tangent of layering stuff up and it ended up quite dense, perhaps more “wall of sound.” Dom really disliked the sound, so I had the choice of going elsewhere with it or going back to the demos. I humoured the idea of stripping it all back, because I know for a fact I can go up my own arse, and secondly, never ever reject a musical idea till you actually try it! The second version is not quite the demos, but definitely closer to the basic demos than the first version of the album, but borrows some elements of the first version. So, I think of the version that went out as a de-mixed version; one track from the first version survived intact and that was ‘Solunar’ which will give you a taste of the sound. It’s pretty much impossible to calculate how much time it took. ‘Mirtazapine Drift’ is the oldest track and I remember spending two days tweaking the hi hats on that while a friend who was homeless was crashing on my couch, which was pretty torturous for him. Some stuff like ‘Klepto’ and ‘Tauen’ fell together very fast, other stuff was the result of hundreds of hours in my home, in our caravan in the Highlands, in Swedish trains on 6 hour journeys, hotel rooms, airports et cetera. Some “songs” like ‘Georgiolab’ were originally directionless that had to be reigned into some more dynamic. The cost would have been astronomical if it weren’t for modern technology meaning I can have a really good home and mobile setup. Work progressed quite slowly as I was also holding down one proper job (mental health nurse) and part time job (research assistant on a study into alcohol issues) and doing a postgraduate degree in psychological therapies. I guess I spent a bit of time looking around for a real drummer locally, unsuccessfully. I would have liked John Wills to drum, but I reckon that bridge is long-burned. An amusing fact that Jono Podmore is credited for mastering and being Master of the Malts because our agreed currency that he was to be paid in was single malt whisky which we are both fans of, so I got the chance to punt him some really nice less famous excellent whiskies such as Arran (where part of the album was recorded).

Where was the album recorded?

It was literally written partly in my house and partly everywhere I have been on holiday for years. From hacking away at Ableton on the train between Stockholm and Swedish Lapland, to installing solar panels on the family caravan in the Highlands (near where my grandad grew up) and dragging a guitar along, to sitting at the airport in Arlanda with the lap.

Glenuig on Lochailort, where a lot of writing happened.

Some miles north of Kvikkjokk in Swedish Lapland, where some location recording happened.

King’s Cave on Arran which features on the intro to TYH where you can hear me walking into the cave with Maddox (the dog on the cover) and him barking at some tourists.

Camusdarach, in the Scottish Highlands and the location for the album cover (Also was a film location for a movie called Local Hero).

Can you share some further words from the writing, recording and producing process?

The album was in some ways almost a compilation album, half the album was created in one process and the other half was coming from different years with different set ups. In terms of how things progressed from original ideas some tracks ended with the first take guitars from the demos surviving (‘Klepto’ and ‘Mirtzapine’) and some were done and redone until it had the right feel. A lot of time was spent recreating VST synth plugin sounds with modular gear (‘Georgiolab’ started off as all plugins). Eventually, everything ended up in Ableton Live to be mixed (then demixed). The mixes were sent to Jono for mastering and it all ended up back in Reaper FM for assembling into production masters.

Would love to know more about your background and how you first got interested in music. Where did you grow up and what can you say about some of the early influences?

I was born in Glasgow, but we moved from a deprived area called Govan to Cumbernauld when I was one or two. My mum was born in Hertfordshire in England and moved to Glasgow with her Scottish parents in her early teens. My dad was from Govan in Glasgow, a traditional shipbuilding area. He and my uncle both worked in the shipyards before becoming the first people in the family to be educated beyond school- they went to art school. My mum was a shorthand typist for the council. Both of my grandfathers died in typical Scottish style of smoking-related illness, before I was born. Looking back I always knew my family were very weird and stood out from my peers, but it wasn’t until I did my nursing training that I began to realise that they (we) are autistic. My dad’s mother was not very verbal other than instructing me to go to the shops to buy her sherry and various fruit and veg written in some version of Scots I never understood well, she eventually ended up in and out of mental hospitals where I think they mistook her autism for psychosis. She was apparently from an Irish traveller background and her brothers were up to dodgy stuff. I remember her being pleased when her hips gave out and she could no longer catch me to hit me with a Shillelagh (traditional Irish weapon made from hawthorn wood) and her pissed on sherry telling the priest who came to visit to “Fuck off up the road!”. My mum’s mum had a special interest in Christianity, absolutely even could be understood through the lens of the bible. She got very annoyed when at the age of ten I started buying punk records and refusing to pray or as I put it “talking to myself!”. She was the last Gaelic speaker (learned from her Highland husband) in the family and I always regret refusing to learn it from her. She was very autistic too, she had no friends and she had an eidetic memory. Her autism would probably be misdiagnosed as OCD, as she would make sure everything was within a mm of where it was meant to be and kept a ledger to manage a rotating system of tinned food. She became quite mentally ill after my mother died and openly blamed me for it, which in turn made me quite unwell, and I backed away from her and she died in a mental institution.

Me on my first passport that was purchased to leave Scotland to go to Germany, aged 19.

So, we moved from Govan to Cumbernauld when I was 1 or 2 as part of the Overspill (post war housing crisis) and we stayed there till my mum died when I was ten and then everything went to shit and I think I moved approximately every 6-9 months from 11 years old till my 30s. Both my parents were pretty much high functioning alcoholics, but it was really my mum that held it all together. There was a lot of domestic violence in the house and the first telephone number I ever memorised was the village police station to report my father beating my mother. After my mum died I left home a few times before I was 16, going into kinship care and then properly left home at 16 years old (thanks to the old benefits system I didn’t have to tough it out in an abusive household till I was 30 like kids do now!). I left Scotland to live in Germany for a while in my 20s and then moved to London to attend art school where I lived till 2002 except for a living in East Germany for a year working in a school after the wall came down.

Richard Montag | Photo courtesy of Toyah Gemmill

I came back to Scotland in 2002 and spent a year working as a chalet maid/handy person in the Highlands and then spent a long period of time living in a protest camp undertaking direct action against nuclear weapons, war crimes and the UK welfare system. I eventually ended up being the last person living in those woods as the other person died of cancer and I got a bit depressed and reckoned I needed to do something meaningful with my life and decided I would like to be a nurse- I remember my mum being an auxiliary nurse and my dad forbidding her from going onto to train a fully qualified nurse. It was a long road to me getting a place on a nursing course as I left school with very little, because I was mostly at my friend Mark’s house making music when we were supposed to be at school.

Weirdly, I come from a very non-musical family, family on my dad’s side are very arty (lots of art teachers) and my cousins are more into film & drama. I joke that I am the rebel who dropped out of art school to join a band. The first music was listening to parents’ records such as classical music, film soundtracks (Ennio Morricone & Sci Fi films), Elvis Presley, The Beach Boys, Tony Hancock. Then my dad bought me a copy of two albums Tangerine Dream’s ‘Zeit’ and Black Sabbath’s ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’… both blew me away. And then as a teenager I discovered punk and love it, Sex Pistols, Stranglers et cetera. Years later I discovered the weird German stuff I listened to as a pre-teen was now the height of cool. Making music started when me and a pal from school (Mark) would bunk off school while his parents where at work and play about with 2 cassette decks, a C64 with a Dattel 8 bit sampler, a Casio CZ 230s synth and a Kay guitar and finally a Casio SK-1 sampler. When I got back from Germany, I had inherited some money from my grandmother’s death and I got an Akai X 7000 sampler, an MMT8 sequencer and Tascam Porta 1, which followed me down to art school in London and into Hair & Skin Trading Company.

Living in the woods in the Scottish Highlands circa 2004.

How did you form The Hair and Skin Trading Company? How did that come about?

It was through Phil Sparling who was the other half of Swing Jugend. When we decided to depart from our Conny Plank/Coil/TG fixations and bring in a guitarist, Phil suggested Nigel (not entirely sure how they knew each other). That got interrupted when Nigel got offered to play 2nd guitar on tour with Loop. I was an art student at Middlesex Polytechnic at the time and Nigel was living with others in squatted buildings on a North London estate. I tried out with the unnamed configuration of what at the time had been that last live configuration of Loop minus Robert Hampson (Nigel Webb, John Wills and Neil McKay). Me and Nigel had a foot in 2 camps for a while until we had to choose one or the other in terms of time, and we opted for the Hair & Skin Trading Company as it eventually became, when Beggars Banquet offered us a deal. I played live and would generally avoid interviews and photographs, which is why I don’t have a great footprint, though there is some grainy live video footage around where you can see a shadowy figure hidden at the back with an Akai/Roland sampler keyboard making a massive racket. When I moved back to Glasgow, I had a box of stuff go missing which was full of old photographs, DAT tapes, rare vinyl, pedals et cetera. So, I have very few old photographs now… none of me at that time and have lost virtually all my old work bar 2 cassettes and a ZIP drive that won’t boot.

Me at the caravan after driving all the way from Glasgow.

You left the band in the middle of recording of the debut album, what were the circumstances around it?

In retrospect, I was an utter mess at that time. I think the final straw was a clash with another band member who said just the wrong thing at the wrong time (in the middle of another of my substance abuse binges) and I walked out and refused to come back, so some of my samples appeared on certain tracks but none of the stuff I did live did (which was largely firing samples and basic oscillator tones through a guitar processor and dubbing delays/reverbs). I was also annoyed that work with Roli Mosimann was turning out a normal rock record and way more mainstream than I think we had intended. We had originally planned to do the album with Einstürzende Neubauten collaborator Jon Caffrey, but a mutual friend at Mute Records had said some unreasonable stuff that fed back to Jon and we never heard from him again. We had also met with Jaz Coleman who was keen to produce that album. He got really freaked out by me, I think he thought I had psyched him out, when I was really just autistic with a stinker of a speed and booze hangover. Funnily enough a friend ended up playing keyboards with Killing Joke and their old sampler is looking down at me from my rack as I write this. I would still love to have heard what Caffrey would have made out of the Hair & Skin Trading Company. The problems with the band were all playing out within the context of not actually knowing I was autistic (it turned out to be a family secret that we are all autistic/ADHD) and it was only after doing my mental health nurse training that I figured that all out. But also during that time in the Hair & Skin Trading Company I had PTSD. It got pretty scary at the squat, someone got stabbed and another had their car torched by a well-known local thug who was reputed to have murdered someone during a robbery. I was told that I was going to be stabbed next. I became pretty much insomniac and had knives gaffer taped in accessible but out of sight areas around my flat and would get woken up during the night by people trying to break my door down and I would be standing in my hall ready with two knives… Thankfully we had done a really good job in strengthening the doors (so much so that the police had to eventually ask us nicely to unlock the doors when we got evicted). After the eviction ended, I was stranded on my own in an empty corner of a London council estate with a gang of thugs who said they were going to kill me wandering about. I became quite paranoid and hypervigilant and had lots of extreme intrusive thoughts and images. I had lost insight and just used drink and drugs to cope, a winning combination that resulted in me not just fucking up the projects and relationships I was in, but a whole series of spectacular fuck ups that will never see the light of day. I eventually got myself out of it by returning to university so that I could get a loan to put a deposit on a flat. I eventually sold off my gear and stopped making music for years. Grim times! I had an on/off relationship with Hair & Skin Trading Company after that doing live sound for them, either doubling up with an old pal Ott and essentially doing live dub/space rock processing stuff or just doing that on my own. I became less and less reliable in terms of the fallout from drink & drugs and a bit like Syd Barrett, they just decided one day not to pick me up in the van.

Would you like to talk more about what was your vision at the time?

I guess I was the square peg in the round hole there, Nigel, John and Neil all knew each other well and were used to playing with each other. They were into their compound time stuff and trying to be a bit more out there compared to other bands. I was kind of the odd one out. Not really a muso but more of a gear nerd that had never played live. They seemed pretty cool with me trying to bring more of a Einstürzende Neubauten slant and big ambient noise thing to it, and there are some hints of that on the first album, I think really the 3rd album they did was probably closer to what the early live stuff was like and what they were really interested in doing and not your verse-chorus structured stuff.

How do you remember those early shows?

I was shit scared at first to be honest as I had never played live before. I remember the gigs being pretty cool actually, we were doing some weird shit others weren’t doing. Even after coming back doinglive sound, no one was else was really fucking with sound like that. Iused to take great delight at open up gigs with big loads and scary half-speed recordings that would get insanely dubbed. Lots of nice memories of good wee gigs on the Camden Scene, the Sausage Factory et cetera was always good once you were up there doing it. We kind of ended up more mixed up with the Too Pure people on the scene rather than the Beggars People from what I remember. Which reminds me, I still wake up in the middle of the night reliving a night I was doing dub and Ott was doing the front of house at the Brixton Academy (Hair & Skin Trading Company supporting The Cult and Fun-Da-Mental) and I sent their Roland digital delay into self-oscillation which flipped the thermal fuses across the PA and I hid under the desk until the fuses cooled and reset.

You were also part of a band called Die Swing Jugend?

A.k.a the Conny Plank/Industrial Records Fan Club. I found a copy of our only release recently and was amused at how some of my same tropes are playing out in ‘Kleptoplasty Ostinato’. After leaving Hair & Skin Trading Company me and Phil had another crack at writing, I was working as a cleaner/part time manager at a studio in North London (where I met Jono Podmore, who used to patiently listen to my mad abstract bits of noise) so we had free studio time at night. We found a signer that was associated with a very well-known and still active band and therefore will remain unnamed. She was a great singer but had even bigger problems than me. We had an entire album demoed up and were due to go to Florence to do the album with a member of the German/Italian band Pankow, but I sadly had to pull the plug on the singer as the singer issues were insurmountable. Contempo weren’t interested in an instrumental album, so that was that. Which is fair enough, as that wasn’t the deal they were interested in.

Do you have any other projects active?

Been doing some more austere and droney stuff… not sure where that will end up. Keep meaning to reactivate Hearing Voices Movement (me and Gareth’s band) but he moved away from the local area, and we talk a lot about doing it, but not doing much about doing it. Same with Blauer Montag as a live band- I am meant to be writing guitar tabs for Gareth but every time I pick a guitar up I end up writing new Blauer Montag material. I have vague plans of going back to stuff I was doing more around the Hair & Skin Trading Company time and get a better field recording setup and integrate that into more ambient stuff. Apart from that I have been getting more into video stuff and accruing a lot of footage that will hopefully integrate into a Blauer Montag lightshow. Keeping making half-hearted attempts to learn some modern coding… All in all though I am pretty much tied up with my day job so all else trickles out at a snail’s pace.

Tell us about the gear you used on the latest album?

The gear snobs are going to cry now. Most of the guitars where done with a the cheapest ever Squier “STRAT” that I got second hand from Thomann and I swapped out the bridge pick up for Gareth’s old American Fender Stratocaster when he upgraded, and a Stratocaster I made from parts (I’ll include a pic). DIed and through a tiny Squier transistor amp that came with the “STRAT” with a budget ribbon mic revoiced with thinner foil and a nice fancy Lundahl transformer. Pedals are rip off Rat pedal, Boss OD and fake Tonebender fuzz I bought off a guy on eBay… Some tracks have a modern eBow.

My first homebrewed guitar, the “Jesus Praiseworthy” Stratocaster with SD rails pickups and Fender hardware.

Synths are a mix of Novation Summit, some Waldorf & Dave Smith (of SCI fame) stuff, some Behringer clones mostly Pro 1 and Arp 2600, and much posher eurorack stuff like Analogue Solutions and Dave Smith… and some kit-built stuff I bought from Thonk! Oh and an Arturia DrumBrute. Gareth came round and put down rhythm guitar on a couple of tracks, Fender Tele through a Boss guitar processor and DI if I remember rightly.Software is everything ended up in Ableton Live (even the stuff that started out in Reaper) and lots of Native Instruments’ stuff (Reaktor, Battery, Super 8, Guitar Rig for synth processing), Serum VST, a few heavily used Waves plugins, Klevgrand Swedish stuff. UAD all over it… especially vintage reverbs/delays. In terms of hardware outboard there is SPX900, Korg DRV-300 for that 80-90s sound and a Strymon Big Sky for big posh wobbly reverb (the additional digital track ‘Tschauaustch!’ (Bye-ouch!) uses it heavily)… oh and an Electrix vocoder.

Very early parts of the recording was done using Reaper FM and an Allen & Heath analogue mixer and a heavily modified Squier Jaguar guitar. There was a second phase where overdubs were done using a Behringer x32 console (now back in its box and will be sold off at some point) and final mixes were done using a ridiculously low specced but lovely sounding Soundcraft MTK22 which made the whole thing come to life (seriously, stop trying to make digital sound nice and just mix through analogue!) Mixes were sent down to Jono for mastering. He ended up getting the job because when I realised Kevin Metcalfe was retired, I wasn’t sure where to take them for a good job and Jono suggested a guy in Berlin that his students use and mentioned he just does his own mastering now. I laughed out loud when he described his super basic setup (a clone classic EQ and clone classic compressor) and it was too irresistible as an idea, especially previously having sat for hours/days with people making microscopic changes in mixing versus a 1960’s approach.

The modular bits and Killing Joke’s old sampler (top centre).

The new stuff I am doing is again getting done on Ableton and guitar is mainly an old Squier ’51 (a favourite of Robin Guthrie’s) and a Telecaster I built around a Fender neck, bare knuckle pickups and a hand-sprayed swamp ash body that weighs a ton.

The Soundcraft with my Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry sub mixing technique settings.

How pleased were you with the sound of the album?

That’s a complicated question. I am very pleased with what went out on Feral Child. There is a first version of the album that I had spent much more time being finicky and layering stuff up and polishing it all up. Dom really didn’t like it. I redid it and literally ended up adopting a Lee Scratch Perry approach and essentially had 12 stereo channels on the desk with the same settings for the whole album and just moved stuff around those 12 channels till it sounded good… which in the end sounded nicer than being technical about it. It was quite liberating to just fly blind, much like working back in the ‘80s with limited resources. I was totally blown away by how good the vinyl sounds!

What are some future plans?

Like I said, I’m supposed to be writing guitar tabs so Gareth can play live but seem to be writing new Blauer Montag material every time I pick the guitar up. Other than that I am getting into doing video and projections… and involving my cousin Robin Johnston (who did the non-dog side of the album cover) I would also like to get something bigger with other like-minded folk in Glasgow going though I am kind of out of the loop here. Getting some Blauer Montag t-shirts printed up, with Maddox the dog on the front… Sadly, we had to get Maddox put down the week before the album came out as he quickly developed end stage cancer… after ten years of never having any big health issues.

What else currently occupies your life? I heard that you’re a mental health nurse and psychological therapist in Glasgow?

Just had a research project into addictions that was several years’ worth of work completed. Which is nice but leaves a big hole. Will be starting my post-graduate dissertation in September. Hoping to get a research project into Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for OCD. Starting training to be a union rep… once a shit stirrer, always a shit stirrer.

Let’s end this interview with some of your favourite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

Old
The Barry Gray Orchestra – ‘TV Themes From Gerry Anderson’s Captain Scarlet’
Beethoven’s 9th Symphony
Tangerine Dream – ‘Zeit’
Black Sabbath – ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’
Sex Pistols – ‘Never Mind the Bollocks Here the Sex Pistols’
PiL – ‘Metal Box/First Edition’
Stiff Little Fingers – ‘Inflammable Material’
Coil – ‘Scatology’
Coil – ‘Persistence Is All’ (Live At Royal Festival Hall) (I was in the audience)
My Bloody Valentine – ‘Loveless’
Lalo Schifrin – ‘Bullitt’
Scraping Foetus off the Wheel – ‘Hole’
H3312prebold

Hawkwind – ‘In Search of Space’
Pink Floyd – ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’
Pink Floyd – ‘Meddle’ (for ‘Echoes’ and ‘One of these Days’)
Cabaret Voltaire – ‘Micro-Phonies’
DAF – ‘Für Immer’
DAF – ‘Alles ist Gut’
Sprung aus den Wolken – ‘The Story of Electricity’
Einstürzende Neubauten – ‘Zeichnungen des Patienten O. T.’
Can – ‘Soundtracks’
Neu = everything!!!
Stereolab – ‘The Groop Played “Space Age Batchelor Pad Music”
Telly Savalas – ‘Telly’
Swans – ‘The Burning World’
Eat Lights Become Lights – ‘Modular Living’
Kraftwerk – ‘Autobahn’
Syd Barrett- ‘Madcap Laughs’
Goblin- ‘Suspria’ OST
Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind – ‘The Shining’ OST
Mogwai, live
Godspeed You! Black Emperor live
Metamono – all of it!
The Cocteau Twins – ‘Heaven or Las Vegas’

Et cetera.

New
Studio Kosmische – all of it
Sleaford Mods – ‘UK Grim’
Benefits – ‘Nails’
Bob Vylan – ‘The Price of Life’
Orbital – ‘Optical Delusion’
Sun’s Signature (Liz Frazer and member of Coil and Massive Attack) – ‘Sun’s Signature’
Just discovering the ‘Castles in Space’ imprint and loving stuff like Polypores,
PNEM- ‘FM / AM’
Last but not least:
Helicon (local band) – ‘God Intentions’

Thank you for taking your time. Last word is yours.

It was a pleasure! Here’s a helpful wee quote, “If You Always Do What You’ve Always Done, You’ll Always Get What You’ve Always Got.” (H. Ford)

Klemen Breznikar

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Feral Child Records Facebook / Twitter