Korine at Le Romandie in Lausanne, through my good old Nikon.
Back in April, Korine, from Philadelphia in the US, were touring Europe and playing in Switzerland for the first time. I was really looking forward to it, and the duo did not disappoint. I loved how energetic their live performance was – punk and raw, which was a great contrast to the synths and 80’s guitars of their music. The audience was a happy mix of goths and music nerds (I was in the latter category), of all ages. Korine told us they played their first encore of the tour that night.
Before the show, Morgan and Trey kindly agreed to do an interview about their new record, A Flame In The Dark. Join us as they tell me about the art and the songs, their hometown Philadelphia, their plans for the future and their vision.
Many thanks to Korine and the Romandie staff for their time and kindness!
You're both from Philadelphia. For someone like me, who has never been to the US and knows nothing about the city besides what is shown in the Rocky movies (laughs), what are some of your favorite spots you would recommend?
Morgan Ramone: You can't go wrong with the Philadelphia Art Museum. It's really impressive by any standard, really. There's a good variety of old and more contemporary stuff. Philly's very cool. I love it there, honestly. But if you've never been to America before, I would say don't bother. As far as the U.S. goes, Philly's one of the better cities in America. My country, Philadelphia.
Trey Frye: My country, Philadelphia. (laughs)
Korine at Le Romandie on film, through my Olympus Trip 35. The pics I took with my Nikon are here.
As musicians and music fans, do you have any favorite venues?
Trey: Well, the bigger one, where some of the bigger acts play, is called Union Transfer. That's the number one mid-size venue, I would say. And there's a place that we've played several times, a classic called Johnny Brenda's. And then there's a very famous DIY-leaning spot and art gallery called PhilaMoca. Those are the three that come to mind, for me, anyway.
Morgan: It's good choices.
Let's talk about your new album, A Flame In The Dark. First, I wanted to ask you about the cover art. It’s a film picture, with a blue star drawn on it. How did the idea come about? The film picture contrasts with the blue star, which looks like it’s been drawn very quickly.
Morgan: Actually, it took me a while to draw it. (laughs) We wanted it to look sort of deranged. That picture is just from outside a venue on tour. I feel like we just have a theme of everything being really shitty but trying to find something good.
Trey: Yeah, as far as purely focusing on the visual aspect of it rather than the meaning, both of us are into photography, Morgan more so than me. We tend to lean into photos that we have taken for our visuals. We've always been into film quality stuff as well. About the blue star, we have a song called Blue Star on the record. That song was written before we decided to make the album, and we wanted that to be the theme of the song. So that's where the blue star came from.
I also wanted to talk about one of my favorite songs from the album, Anhedonia.
Trey: It's a medical term for not being able to feel anything and severe depression. Like Morgan was saying, regarding the album art, we have a theme in our music of writing about things that are painful or difficult, and trying to flip them into something positive. So that song has a bit more of an upbeat instrumental, with lyrics that are not super upbeat. We have different ways of writing music – sometimes one of us will start a demo and we’ll bring it to each other. But If I recall correctly, I'm pretty sure we were both just playing around with it.
Morgan: We were in the same room, right?
Trey: Yeah. I think that Morgan wrote the guitar part, and then I wrote the bass part while they were playing the guitar part. It just built around that. Some of our songs are very synthesizer-heavy and some are more guitar-focused. That's a very guitar-focused song.
From the interviews I read, you started back in 2017, so almost 10 years ago. If you could meet your younger selves, would you tell them anything?
Morgan: I don't know. I don't really like to control people or anything. What do they say about the best laid plans? I can't remember, but basically, nothing really turns out exactly the way you want it anyway.
Trey: For me, the only thing I would say is to not take yourself super seriously and just enjoy the moments as they come, rather than focus on what hasn't happened yet. The way the world is, especially in the US, it's very easy to be consumed by the seriousness of it and not just enjoy it. And I think I would tell myself to enjoy it more and not take it so seriously.
Morgan: I think that's good advice.
We have an idiom for this, in the French part of Switzerland. We say ‘pète un coup’, literally ‘fart a little’. It means ‘relax, don't take yourself so seriously.’ (laughs)
Morgan: I like that.
Trey: Yeah, I need to do that. Fart a little. (laughs)
What can we expect from Korine in the future?
Trey: We're doing this European tour – we haven't done a long European tour like this in three years almost. And then, we're hoping to just work on more music after this. So, hopefully more music later this year.
Morgan: I think we're always trying to work on something new and to push this down as far as we can. We don't want to make the same thing over and over again. I feel like that’s rewarded nowadays in a lot of ways by the algorithmic machine. And then you have a lot of shit that sounds the same. I don't really see the point in doing that personally. It might be for monetary gain, but is it art?
Korine is an electronic pop band from Philadelphia
I have just booked my first ever tour in Japan for my friends Giant Moa. If you're in one of those cities, come say hi/shoot me a message! I'll update the post as I receive more infos about the bands who will play with Giant Moa.
07.15 (水) 東京 Tokyo Mona Records / TBA
07.16 (木) 横浜市 Yokohama Bar El Puente / TBA
07.18 (土) 横須賀 Rock bar F! Yeah Yokosuka / TBA
07.22(水) 東京 Tokyo MOGU MOGU with Tokyo Lil Boy & Deadbeat Painters
07.24(金) 大阪市 Osaka Namba mele / TBA
07.25(土) 東京 Tokyo Club heavy Sick with Salt and Curve, Nanox, Akabane Vulgars & VVVVision
Parker Leftover @ Le Romandie, Lausanne, 08.04.2026
Here are pictures of the great Parker Leftover from Vevey and Bienne opening for Korine in Lausanne through my Nikon! Such a great show. Check them out!!
Portraits are shot with my good old Olympus Trip 35!
What a joy to watch Korine play Switzerland for the first time in Lausanne! Their show was incredible. Wild and 80s! Thank you Korine for the great show! Here are photos I took with my good old Nikon!
Here are pics shot with my Nikon of Psychedelic Porn Crumpets playing Winterthur! Such an incredible show. The place was PACKED! I had so much fun. Thank you Psychedelic Porn Crumpets!
Psychedelic Porn Crumpets before the show, through my Nikon.
Last month I finally got to see the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets live, along with my friends Fomies! We also met before their show for a quick interview about their new record Pogo Rodeo, their next record, their lives in Australia and more. Many thanks to Psychedelic Porn Crumpets and their team for their time and kindness!
Tell me about your lives in Australia outside of touring. I read that you’re originally from Perth, but you moved to the seaside?
Jack MacEwan: Yeah, we're all from Perth. We lived in a house together in City Beach, you could see the ocean from our balcony. And we had both our studios in there and we recorded.
Luke Parish: We did one year by the sea side. One messy year. Lots of "vegans" came to that house (laughs).
Jack: But it was great. And then we had the Masters from High Visceral. That was 2016, wasn't it ?So that was 10 years ago now. And then we started recording bits of Part Two until we sort of went separate ways. Now Rish lives up in the hills, I’m back in the middle of the city.
Chris Young: I live close to the ocean. I can ride down on my push bike. It's good.
Jack: It's the best part of Australia. If you're there, the Western Australian coastline is just…You literally go to a beach and there'll be no one else. And the whole coastline just goes the whole way up to pretty much Broome, doesn't it? From Esperance to Broome, it's just white sand and coral reef. It's beautiful. You could just go on holiday and drive up and down that coast forever if you wanted to.
Psychedelic Porn Crumpets playing in Winterthur, still through my Nikon. The place was packed!
I went to Australia once, but I did all the touristy stuff on the East Coast (laughs).
Jack: I mean, you have to do it, don’t you? If you went to the West, the people from the East would be like, ‘why did you go there?’
Luke: Yeah, it's nice, but don't tell anyone. Just keep it a secret.
Okay. (laughs) So tonight you're going to play songs from your new album, Pogo Rodeo. In French, ‘Pogo’ means ‘mosh pit’. Is it the same in English?
Jack: No! That's amazing though. I meant ‘Pogo’, like a Pogo stick. You know, just a bunch of people jumping. And with the horse on the cover, it seemed an energetic phrase, ‘Pogo Rodeo’.
Luke:I looked it up. In French, it’s ‘Le bâton sauteur’.
Literally a ‘jumping stick’!
Luke: A mosh stick.
Jack: That's a nice crossover then. I wish we released a heavier record for it and used the name. I like your version better.
Could you also tell me more about the song Born in the A.D’s, which sounds like ‘born in the 80s’?
Jack: There we go. You got it ! (laughs) So, an acid dent is an accident. There's lots of little plays on words in our songs. It’s Chris's favourite song (laughs). It's one of the hardest songs ever to play.
Chris: It is my favourite song Jack's ever written for the band.
Jack: I will get to a point where we'll be able to do it. We actually did it at the Winterthur Festival last time. It was the very first time we played it in Switzerland.
Chris: It's just lots of fast riffs.
Jack: I suppose the second verse is quite noodley. And then the third verse is just like Dick Dale for two minutes, which is kind of hard. I like the song, though. I think it fits nicely on the album. I haven't listened to it in a while.
Speaking of the album, I was wondering about the use of the omnichord.
Jack: I bought one, and then I broke my elbow, and I hadn't turned it on yet. Chris was coming around to basically play some guitar parts. I got to the point where I was thought, ‘maybe turn on this Omnicord thing that you bought’. It was a lot easier to play with a broken elbow than a guitar, so I started writing songs that way. You just push a button and the chord comes out. That's a nice sound. Rich has had one for a while, though, haven't you?
Luke: Yeah, they're great.
Jack: But then they became really expensive after Damon Albarn did that whole trick when he wrote Clint Eastwood.
Chris: The drum pattern is just a built-in loop from the whole song.
Jack: I like the strum bit. It brings in a chord, opens up. You can put a bit of delay on it as well.
How did you decide on which songs you were going to play that instrument?
Jack: I suppose the slower bits and pieces. It fills a gap. I suppose with a guitar chord delay on it, it rings out a different space.
Chris: It's chime-y.
Jack: Yeah, it's almost like a wind chime. It works with a cymbal. I wouldn't put it in everything, but just at the start of each verse or the start of each chorus, to make it wider as a stereo sound.
On that subject, your musical trajectory sounds a little bit more gentle. You've also released some acoustic videos of you playing your songs. Can we expect more of that from the band in the future?
Jack: Yes, 100%. That's the way I think it blends into this new one that we're creating at the moment. But then I showed Hutchee, who's our tour manager, a few of the tunes and he said ‘no, you want to go heavier.’
Chris: (to Jack) Your Spotify algorithm is all nursery rhymes.
Jack: I just had a baby. She's eight months old. It's just singing nursery rhymes all day long. So I think the Omnicord works. There's a lot of really nice, slower paced songs that we’ve recorded at Rich's house and they just need to be a little bit evolved. We've done the drums and I've got a rough sort of demo of how I want it to be. I think once we all get a grasp on it and try and make them a bit larger, it would be really nice to play them live. We don't really play slower stuff that much, because the shows seem to be more chaotic. But then, I think there's another heavier kind of stuff working. The new album that we're working on at the moment is a softer one. The guitars are in B, like baritone tuning, so there's a lot of room to evolve. It's a heavier, soft album. Darker.
I’m looking forward to it. Finally, if you could say anything to your younger selves from 2014, what would it be ?
Jack: "Don’t worry". It seems to have worked quite well with us not caring, which has been nice. Or maybe, «Don't sign the record deal.» But then even, that worked. Everything we've done seems to have put us on a good trajectory.
Luke: I would say "Things are still ticking along". When you're younger, you wonder "should I get a real job? Should I do this?" You're panicking all the time about not being able to survive. And we're still here.
Jack: We definitely threw ourselves in the deep end at the start of it, which I think has managed to now get us to a level where we're used to hard work. There's a good band ethos.
Chris: And we're still all very in-house operation. We still do our own gear set up. Loading the van, unloading the van...
Luke: Bookkeeping. That's my job. (laughs)
Chris : We're all quite tied to it being successful. So everyone puts in so much work to make it happen.
Luke: It's a working class band.
Representing.
Jack: Did you remember all those questions off the top of your head?
Yes.
Jack: That's amazing. I've never had an interview where someone hasn't read it off something.
13 years after his last show in Lausanne, Miles Kane was back! I was lucky enough to be able to take pictures during this amazing show. The crowd however, was awfully calm. So calm, that Miles Kane didn't do an encore. My friends and I, along with a few other fans, were singing and dancing though, trying to get the party started. But people didn't follow. It hurt, because Miles is one of my favorite artists ever and deserved more. Shot with my Nikon!!
What a way to start 2026 by seeing one of my favorite bands ever, Bass Drum of Death! Their show in Zurich was amazing, they played all the hits plus songs from their new album SIX! Here are photos I took with my good old Nikon!
We also did an interview before the show if you're interested, you can check it out HERE! Many thanks to Bass Drum of Death as always for their kindness and their time!
Bass Drum of Death right after our interview at Exil.
Back in Early February, Bass Drum of Death - one of my favorite bands of all time - were back in Switzerland, this time at Exil in Zurich! I asked John if he and the band were down for an interview about the band's new record Six, and he kindly agreed.
Before the show, I joined the band backstage to ask them about Six, their classic rock and T-Rex influences, if they would have done anything differently during the band's 17 years of career, and more.
Many thanks to John, Jim Ian and their manager Sam!
Could you tell me more about the title of your new album Six? I think it's different from the others. Is that some kind of milestone?
John Barrett: I was looking at the song titles, and nothing jumped out. So I was like 'well, you get one shot to name a record like a number.' I thought, 'let's go ahead and take it.' It looks good written out. There wasn't a song title that really fit super well, so we figured it was best to go that route.
The cover art was made by Sarah Goldstein. It shows a rich-looking hand of a woman with jewelry. Did she present the idea to you, or was it a collaborative process?
John: We all collaborated on the idea and bounced things back and forth. I still don't know exactly where that hand...
Jim Barrett: She collaged it all together.
Ian Kirkpatrick: I remember throwing out a Ministry cover. We were like, ‘the hand thing is cool, let's roll with that.’ And then she ran with it and made it look really awesome.
I like it. It looks fancy.
John: Yeah, it's fancy. It's way fancier than we are. (laughs)
Bass Drum of Death playing at Exil. More photos of the show here.
I've noticed something about a few albums you guys have released so far – from at least Just Business onwards. In every record, there's maybe one or two songs that sound more like 'classic rock.' For example, in Just Business, there was The Odds Are Good. And now in Six, Like A Knife and Do Nothing. My question is: do you like T-Rex? (laughs)
Jim: That's the T-Rex song for sure.
John: Basically, whenever we have songs like that, it's difficult to have them not come off super cheesy. That's why T-Rex was so great, in lesser hands the chord progressions and the melodies would be really cheesy. But because it's Marc Bolan, it sounds awesome. So I'm always trying to be very careful and make sure we don't veer into dad rock blues sort of stuff, because it can go there very quickly.
Really? I think you're still far away from it!
John: I hope so. I don't know, sometimes we get closer than I would like. We're just hyper critical of ourselves. (laughs)
The video for Do Nothing was dated from 87, but it also reminded me of the Marc Bolan’s show "Marc". He had a TV show in the 70s where he would invite bands like The Jam to play. So that also reinforced my theory (laughs).
John: We filmed at this place where they had a full VHS set up with the old school editing bay and everything. So basically that was just the date that was up on the cameras that we filmed it with. We thought 'it looks cool, let's just leave it.'
Ian: That was sort of a coincidence, but I like the connection, that's really cool.
You did a songs in collab with other artists a few years back (ndlr: for example “You Were Right” with Eve 6 back in 2021). I’d like to know if you had any ideas for the next record already and if so, would you like to do a collab again?
John: That's a good question. It's hard to do collabs with two bands, because it's too many cooks.I think it'd be fun to do a song where we were the backing band for somebody else singing. I don’t know.
I would try something like a battle of solos. (laughs)
Jim: I've seen it where bands will cover each other's songs and they do a split 7''. That would be cool. We should probably do more shit like that, for reach and to stay relevant.
Ian: It would be fun.
Any names come to mind?
Jim: Who would we collab with?
John: Bad Bunny.
Ian: Charli XCX.
John: As far as a new record, we basically put this one out in September and we've essentially been on tour since then. In the last five months, we had a month off. I've got some voice memos and stuff jotted down, but nothing too much past that. It's hard to write on the road. The show takes up so much of the day, and when you're not doing that, you're traveling. And when you have a day off, you either want to try to see a city or sleep. There's not really a whole lot of time, but hopefully in the spring, when we have a little bit more downtime, we can get back cracking.
With the Bass Drum of Death project having been going on for more than 16 years, what would you tell your younger selves if you could meet them?
John: I was telling Sam, I think I might have been doing it longer than I haven't been doing it. I mean, it's pretty close. It's getting there. I would tell myself, 'when you move to New York, maybe do more of music and less of partying' (laughs). Because there's a bit of a gap there. I don't really think I would do very much different at all, to be honest.
Jim: I wouldn't tell myself this, but it should be 'go get a marketing degree. Just finish school'. (laughs) And 'get really good at Bitcoin. Buy Bitcoins now. And you don’t know this yet, but become a social media director.'
John: Actually, that’s what we should have done – for our early shows, we should have asked to get paid in Bitcoin!
Ian: I would tell myself, 'be more open to playing and be more open to ideas, instead of thinking whatever you’re thinking is the way it's gotta be. Collaboration is great, and it helps make things a lot better.'
I am back in Japan, and took my film camera with me! I doscovered the great garage rock band Mustains in Osaka, they were incredible. Check them out, they are new!
Just wanted to post the pictures I took of Curtis' show with my digital camera as well!! As you can see, we had fun backstage after the show. The pictures I took with my film camera are here!
Here are pictures from Curtis Harding's sunday show in Bern! Such an amazing show, presenting his new record, Departures & Arrivals: Adventures of Captain Curt! Shot with my good old Olympus Trip 35 and a basic kodak 200 film!
The Paddingtons @ The O2 Academy Islington, London, 25.10.2025
Sadly I couldn't get the photo permission for the show of one of my favorite bands, but I could still sneak in my film camera! Here are the results of this incredible show!
What a joy to watch the bandfriends from Sun Cousto play again!! Their show was so good, and I got crazy pictures with the intense lights!! Big love Sun Cousto!!
The KVB @ Humus and Wine fest, Lausanne, 20.09.2025
I had not seen the KVB from Berlin live in years - what a joy to watch them perform again, along with new songs from their album Tremors! Check it out! Many thanks to The KVB for letting me take pictures of this incredible show!
Lone Assembly @ Humus and Wine fest, Lausanne, 20.09.2025
Here are photos of the great Lone Assembly from Lausanne playing a cool goth set in the public gardens!! Check out their new song In the open if you haven't already!
Here are photos of the amazing Magic and Naked, who are back after a decade!! What a joy to see them play again. Magic and Naked were one of the first bands I ever interviewed, back when I was living in Geneva! They sounded just as great as I remember!!
