Cut 989

From Ōtautahi, Aotearoa (Christchurch, New Zealand) comes a collaboration between James Barrett, best known for his work in techno on Perc Trax, Mord, South London Analogue Material, and KAOS/OAKS as Keepsakes, and Henry Nicol, a founder of industrial-freak outfit Log Horn Breed who’s work as a member of Dog Power saw his music signed to legendary Aotearoa indie label Flying Nun. As CUT 989 the two bring their respective musical worlds in to collision, producing a debut EP representing a mutated hybrid of industrial, post-punk, techno, and experimental music tied together with cynical lyricism musing on anxiety, human nature and the crumbling state of politics and society in the modern era.

CUT 989 is a new musical project based in New Zealand that brings together two artists who have been working on different sound concepts to date, is CUT 989 a consequence of the sum of influences of both members?

Yes, it’s definitely a combination of the influences we’re both bringing to the project – Henry comes from a punk and industrial background, while James comes from a techno background. Part of the motivation of working together in the first place came from a desire to combine our previous musical experience together.

That being said we’ve always shared a lot of common ground in what we’ve listened to over the years as music fans, which also fed in to us beginning to work together.

Does CUT 989 imply that this is going to be your only project from now on, or are you going to continue to be active in your respective solo projects as well?

We’re definitely going to continue all of our solo projects as well. We’re both interested in a lot of different styles of music and will continue to pursue other avenues by ourselves and with other friends and collaborators.

You are both from New Zealand, is there a music scene in your country that supports the style of CUT 989, or do you plan to work in other areas such as Europe?

There’s definitely a thread of industrial and weirdo electronics that runs through the Aotearoa music scene and underground music fans here are generally very open, so there’s certainly a place for it. But I wouldn’t say there’s a bunch of people producing an explicitly similar style to what we’re doing.

It would be certainly nice to eventually get to bring this project to Europe as well – but really we’re just enjoying the process of making music and seeing where this goes naturally for now.

What is the meaning of the name CUT 989?

989 was a number we both kept seeing in dreams and when awake, often on car number plates. We started researching angel numbers online and came in to a wonderful group of supportive angel enthusiasts that helped us decipher the meaning of these sightings.

As soon as we started the project the sightings stopped immediately. Hence the band name.

CUT 989 was born with a manifesto that claims among other things the rebellion against the system, what exactly does your project claim?

Well as soon as we stopped sighting the number individuals within the online angel numbers community felt we no longer represented the ‘light’ – which felt like a big personal betrayal at the time, so part of this is a rejection of their closed-minded and over-positive morality.

We wouldn’t so much call what we represent a rebellion against the system as much as it’s an acceptance of life’s inherent unfairness and chaos. We’re living in a world where this is increasingly the reality we face, but many people are running around wilfully ignorant of this. Especially a lot of culture right now seems to be stuck in a cycle of positive escapism and boring nostalgia – which is something James has especially noticed within the dance music scene. We sit firmly in rejection of this kind of pointless positivity as it provides cover for those who seek to further denigrate our species for their own gain.

Does your music fit in with the allegations of the manifesto?

It most certainly does. A lot of the lyrical content is about exactly what we discussed above – about the ways most people go about behaving the same way day-in, day-out, expecting things to change for the better. About how people keep supporting the same causes and politicians expecting them to improve and provide a fairer world. What we need, and what is ultimately coming, is much larger, cataclysmic change that will upset the comfort of all our lives.

On August 18th you will release Opinions, your first release, how do you define the style of this EP?

It’s a pretty free-form and organic thing in terms of the combination of styles that are there. We didn’t really have any expectations in terms of what style we wanted to create when we first started working on it, within a few songs a mutant hybrid sound came together. Really the process of how we worked together ended up defining the style as well as our existing musical personalities.

There’s certainly a lot of industrial influence in there – we’re both huge fans of Coil – and then a lot of dance music influence too. Christchurch has a lot of great underground raves that we’re both big fans of – there we’re fed a range of techno, break-beats and bass music which has some influence on the project.

I suppose that both the name of the EP and the title of the tracks have some meaning that we don’t know, are the names linked to the philosophy of the manifesto?

Yes. Everything we do is linked to the name, the number, and the manifesto – in both our dreams and our daily lives.

Is CUT 989 a project created for the stage, or just for the studio?

At this stage it is mostly a studio project, but we are interested in playing live shows in the future. We’re just waiting for the right moment and opportunity. A lot of the music wouldn’t have been possible without the heavy manipulation possible today with computers so working out how to replicate this in a live setting will be an interesting task that we want to try at some stage.

What future plans do you have for this project?

We’re sitting on a huge pile of unreleased music even after this record comes out, so we’d like to get some more of that out in to the world and work towards an album at some stage.

Otherwise, we want to keep it organic and see what happens naturally. We hope if we continue the project we’ll see the number once more.