Interview: KMFDM Frontman Talks Upcoming Collection, Album & Tour

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Hailing from Germany, KMFDM were one of the very first bands to fuse industrial with metal as well as one of the first to bring industrial music to the mainstream. The band is now 32 years old, still tours worldwide and releases albums which receive positive reception. To celebrate the band’s history, they will releasing a compilation called Rocks-Milestone Reloaded on September 9th. This compilation contains songs from all over the band’s history with certain tracks being remixes of the originals. I was able to interview the band’s main songwriter, Sascha Konietzko, on this release as well as other topics.

Can you tell us a bit about this new compilation?

Rocks is a compilation that is not a best of, but more of a celebration of KMFDM’s history. We left out certain songs that some would say should be there, such as “Juke Joint Jezebel”, but this is more of our own personal favorites and not a greatest hits. All the tracks are professionally mixed and using both new and older songs. Everything was put together greatly, and some of the tracks are even remixes of older ones.

I see it also comes with the film We are KMFDM

You are correct. We are KMFDM is 90 minutes of live footage and about a half hour of behind the scenes stuff and interviews. It is a very entertaining product.

You also have a new album on the way.

Yes, it is scheduled to be released in early 2017, followed by extensive touring. We have about nine or ten songs written out. We are just now getting started on recording vocals and putting it all together.

By extensive I’m guessing this means it will be a worldwide tour. 

Yes, we plan on going all over… no specific dates planned yet. Our most important territory to cover is the US: plan lots of gigs there and then we will see how it works in the rest of the world. Europe and Australia are planned for sure.

Any support acts for this tour?

We are asking this band called Lord of the Lost to play with us. Awesome young band. They combine metal with goth rock and other stuff. Check them out!

Now to play Alternative Nation’s knockoff of Loudwire’s Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction. [Editor’s note: Please do not sue us. Thank you.] It says on the page for industrial metal that you do not like metal.

Who said I wasn’t into metal? That is really off.

I’m sure it was poorly researched. What made you decide to mix these genre’s anyway? You are one of the first to do this. 

The whole idea came to play in the late 80’s when sampling technology became available to regular folks. I then saw myself playing around sampling Metallica and Slayer and looping them over with techno beats. We helped create this new genre. We used to call it the “ultra heavy beat”. When we came to America, we saw that a bunch of bands were already doing this. We felt at home and our popularity skyrocketed overnight after we opened for Ministry. This was in 1990 during their Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste Tour.

Are there any newer industrial or electronic acts out today you really like?

I’m a really big fan of Combichrist. We played with Combichrist in 2006 during their first very big tour. I like how they made this transition from a really hard electronic band to a full metal outfit.

I notice you guys have some songs that are very political songs but also some really funny ones like “Sucks”. 

That is just the way we are. We are sometimes sorta interested in what is going on in the world. On the other hand we are also people with a sense of humor and like making fun of ourselves. You have to write about something that means something to you otherwise you come off as edgy.  We take what we do very serious, but we don’t take ourselves serious.