Slender Flame (Hannover, GERMANY)
SynthPoP For The Masses

 

visit Slender Flame

contact Slender Flame:
contact@slenderflame.de
URL: www.slenderflame.de

Artists Music
Markus Vocals, songwriting, programming
Harald Vocals, songwriting, programming
Michael Guitars (only at live-acts)
 
Date: 2002

Well, here is the full length report about Slender Flame.
Thank you Harald for answering all my questions.

What kind of Jobs do your members have - only Musicians?
We are musicians by heart, but not by profession. All of us are working in regular jobs but we spend most of our spare time for making music.

What kind of instruments did each Member of Slender Flame learn?
We have different levels of musical education. In total we are able to play synths, guitar, bass, cello, flutes (as a result of early musical education). The voice should also be considered as an instrument. Some of us also have played in other bands before.

How old are you?
Hmm,...well 30 or at least facing to be soon...

Tell me something about the history of your musical career?
Markus and me have been friends since primary school, the first few records we bought together. This is the reason for the blind understanding in musical issues, for sure. After some years of listening to music we decided to do it ourselves. So we would have more music we could listen to and that we also like. Actually we do not listen to our songs any more after working with them for so long...
Slender Flame exists almost 10 years in which we have seen quite some development both in song-writing in mixing our music.

How do you describe your music and what do you want to express with it?
We call it wave-pop because people like to have a name for everything. Actually we don't intend to express some special message, we just hope there is enough emotion and expression in the music to touch the listener. Even if we feel very angry the music should not be only aggressive, full of anger and frustration. But emotions still can transformed in music that sounds good.

Your music sounds 80s influenced.
Did you get influenced by some SynthPoP bands, like Depeche Mode, New Order, Cure or New Romantics?

It would be pretty unrealistic to say we have not been influenced by the music we grew up with.on the other hand it's hard to say how much influence our heroes had and still have on our music. So far we were happy to mainly get reviews that stressed our music did not really fit any category - there is nothing worse than the image of sounding exactly like someone else. That music already exists, there is nothing to add to it.

Some songs include some guitar-playing. Will you force to include more guitar-playing to your music in future?
Michi, who is our guitar-player, has become more and more involved in our music, especially in our live shows. We don't want to force guitar playing to our songs, though. It's just like the decision between English or German lyrics, there are songs where one fits better than the other. So, if we feel a guitar would underline the atmosphere of a song, we will happily introduce it. We are still free to heavily process the guitar, when Michi is not watching.

What are your plans for the future?
The plan for the very near future is to go to a Danish studio in April for four weeks and record our album which is planned to be released in early summer this year. We will then try to promote it with more live gigs.

How many CDs, Demos did you release and will release in future?
Our 'official' recordings are 'injection' (promo-ep containing 4 songs), 'seven songs' (our first album, containing 8 songs, some of which were also on 'injection'), and now the new single 'great on tv'. Before that there were some cassette demos that make us smile nowadays.

Releases
Great On TV (Promo) (read the review click here)
Seven Songs
Injection (Promo-ep)

Back to top