Vibrant sound textures and unpredictable compositions drew together two musicians from Halen in Belgium and together they created Ikea Mutilation Manual. A band that revives the spirit of inventiveness and freshness that dominated the beginning of the 2000's permeated with bands that by meshing different and apparently contrasting genres created their own style and universe.
In Ikea Mutilation Manual the experimental meets melody and a cocktail of amusing genres, from jazzy freestyle riffing, to interludes of Primus-inspired improvisation, punk, metal and rock riffs meshed together and a whole healthy dose of sense of humor.
Their latest record, Schizophrenia Schematic is the continuation of their previous sonic explorations from their two other albums, Anxiety Assembly (2017) and Construction of Compulsive Chagrin (2018) and still manages to excite and surprise the listener all through the 24 themes of the album.
Ikea Mutilation Manual offers us eclectic and intrepid musical adventures with a little dash of sense of humor on the side.
For the last record, I see it as a reflection of our modern times and how the borders between psychosis and reality are becoming ever thinner, with social media algorithms, tele-consumerism and the lurking fear of extinction, war, famine, poverty... always on the horizon.
- Ikea Mutilation Manual is a rather unconventional name that adapts perfectly to your kind of sound. It has a lot of different sonic elements ranging from grindcore, to punk and metal, even some mathcore in a very free and experimental base. What common ground, be it personal or musical, do you guys share and how did the idea for the band arise?
Owen: Tom (who does bass and co-vocals for the band) and I met way back in high school, but ironically, we never really hung out until about five years after we graduated. We knew we were both into bands like Gwar and Mr. Bungle back then, and I had an obsession with grindcore around that time, so we picked up some stuff from looking at each other’s band shirts (Tom also bought a demo CD of a fastcore/grind band I was in back then). So, we kept track of each other, and I was forming another band in 2016 (a proggy project that I needed the right people for), so I asked Tom if he’d be interested in joining after he heard a demo for said band. We never got to fully forming that band, but he did have some parts he wanted to demo. A little after I had done some drums and guitars, he wanted to do vocals. That kind of caught me off guard, but the result ended up sounding like something that incorporated a lot of stuff that we couldn’t previously get away with in other bands. And the rest is history!.
I think there’s a lot of shit that affects ordinary people, whatever race/gender identity/orientation/religious belief, and we feel that every day. There are reasons for why that is, and art has always been a way to mock the true people in power. Last time I checked, those people are still far right-leaning conservatives and lobbyists, in increasingly more parts of the world. Aggression is a big part of our music but it’s also directed towards justified targets, or used in a context where we want it to be ironic or funny.
- Just like in your previous albums, the artwork is a very nice collage of people’s faces, body parts or pieces from paintings. It’s captivating to look at in a way like “where’s wally?” to see if you can identify familiar faces or elements. It contains Skin from Skunk Anansie, HP Lovecraft, Asterix, a lot of eyeballs and the creature from the black lagoon so it’s quite an eclectic mix, much like your music. It’s like a cerebral but fluid patchwork of sounds, how important do you think is the role of experimentation in your art, be it visual or musical?
Owen: One of my favorite bands ever is Estradasphere, a group of multi-instrumentalists from Santa Cruz, California. They played dozens of genres and styles, juxtapositioned and suprapositioned in the songs, and I always loved the “aha!”-effect that that elicited as they were the first band I heard take that concept as far. We’re also both big Zappa, Beefheart, Zorn and Patton fans; they all did this kind of stuff and with good reason. So that’s an element we inductively put in the music. Visually we try to represent what the music sounds like. For the last record, I see it as a reflection of our modern times and how the borders between psychosis and reality are becoming ever thinner, with social media algorithms, tele-consumerism and the lurking fear of extinction, war, famine, poverty... always on the horizon.
Owen: One of my favorite bands ever is Estradasphere, a group of multi-instrumentalists from Santa Cruz, California. They played dozens of genres and styles, juxtapositioned and suprapositioned in the songs, and I always loved the “aha!”-effect that that elicited as they were the first band I heard take that concept as far. We’re also both big Zappa, Beefheart, Zorn and Patton fans; they all did this kind of stuff and with good reason. So that’s an element we inductively put in the music. Visually we try to represent what the music sounds like. For the last record, I see it as a reflection of our modern times and how the borders between psychosis and reality are becoming ever thinner, with social media algorithms, tele-consumerism and the lurking fear of extinction, war, famine, poverty... always on the horizon.
- You also have shorter songs than the famously shortest song in the world by Napalm Death that is 10 seconds long. Image 39 is only six seconds long. Grindcore seems to have a huge influence in your music, is it true? And if so, how does it reflect in your daily life? Some grindcore has a very political and social standing in some hard questions in our society, like the fight for animal rights or gender equality, do you identify yourselves with such struggles?
Owen: We both spent our later teens/early twenties sifting through one grindcore record after the next, and related genres like powerviolence, fast hardcore, deathgrind and more technical death metal stuff, so blastbeats just need to be in there for us. We think it channels aggression the best out of all drum patterns. As far as social issues are concerned, those are topics that have interested me for a very long time; I can’t see how to set them apart from all things in life. I think there’s a lot of shit that affects ordinary people, whatever race/gender identity/orientation/religious belief, and we feel that every day. There are reasons for why that is, and art has always been a way to mock the true people in power. Last time I checked, those people are still far right-leaning conservatives and lobbyists, in increasingly more parts of the world. Aggression is a big part of our music but it’s also directed towards justified targets, or used in a context where we want it to be ironic or funny.
Vocals are usually the part where we really crack up while writing and recording; but the music also gets written in ways that it accommodates vocal ideas. We don’t take ourselves very seriously; at the same time we want to make authentic music where we can do whatever we feel like, and that sounds different with each record.
- In your latest record, Schizophrenia Schematic, there is one song, Image 36 that starts up with a whirlwind of chaos and aggression and then it splashes in a more humorous take on yodelling. How important is sense of humor in your music and daily lives?
Owen: I think we subconsciously got humor in there from the get-go, mostly because we like to laugh a lot to cope with shit (both of us struggle with depression and dysthymia). Doing the band is really therapeutic for us, coming together every week to write and practice, especially considering we also both work full-time now. Vocals are usually the part where we really crack up while writing and recording; but the music also gets written in ways that it accommodates vocal ideas. We don’t take ourselves very seriously; at the same time we want to make authentic music where we can do whatever we feel like, and that sounds different with each record. That’s where the yodelling came in.
- Does Ikea Mutilation Manual entail killer furniture? Like that classic movie The Refrigerator from the 90’s, that features a demonic fridge that eats people?
Owen: For sure it does! Even Cronenberg’s “bone gun” is listed in our catalogue for direct order. Another example is the killer elevator from the Dutch horror film “De Lift”, the space jockey pilot seat from ‘Alien’, and so forth.
- How do you envision a videoclip for one of your songs?
Owen: We actually have had ideas for one for a long time. We don’t want to spoil it, but you can expect it to be as silly and crazy as the music, if we get around doing it for this record.
- Do you have any will to tour and play shows all around or are you more focused on studio work?
Owen: This corner of Belgium is hard if you need musicians who can simultaneously handle the music on the guitars, and be humble enough to mesh with our personalities. We don’t appreciate people with massive ego’s, for instance. Finding a drummer would be even harder so if we do it, we’ll have to find someone for the guitars so I can focus on drums/vocals, and Tom on bass. We have tried to recruit people but have thus far failed to find someone who matches with us on all the right levels. Maybe one day; we definitely would love to play live and maybe do some short runs abroad.
- You come from Halen in Belgium and in this record and previous ones you had collaborations in some songs by other musicians. How is the cultural and music underworld in Halen? And what can you tell us about the city itself?
Owen: Halen is kind of a small town; Sint-Truiden (which is where Tom is from) qualifies a bit more as a city, so does Diest, where we both went to high school. Belgium is kind of a modern Western country failing to modernize; music hypes kind of ride on the back of the rest of the world, people are pretty reserved around here (and at often times quite shallow?), etc. But we still have a lot to cherish, like Django Reinhardt, childhood memories, personal experiences and how you link that to specific places and times. There is some semblance of an underground scene here, but we’re kind of too weird/extreme to fit in properly. We’re also sort of bitter with how bands and scenes tend to work in this day and age; I rarely go to local shows anymore. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but a lot of new music either sounds stale and overdone or just not very “riffy”, or not in the good way (to our ears, at least). Part of why we make this music is because no one else around here does exactly what we’d want to hear. So in order to be able to hear it, we have to do it ourselves. Other bands we’re in get a bit more recognition, but surprisingly less in Belgium than in countries like Germany. Maybe it’s because we’re not the most explicitly social dudes around and we really don’t care much about purposefully networking and stuff like that. We just want to make music, really. I wouldn’t say we’re assholes or anything though, we’re pretty laid back, cool guys who can talk to anyone about virtually anything. It’s just that we’d rather focus on creating stuff for now!
- What bands/projects have you been listening recently and are really into?
Owen: The latest Car Bomb record has been on repeat for almost two months now for me; I’ve also been revisiting some Frank Zappa records lately. There’s also a new Cloudrat record which is pretty great, and I still can’t really wrap my head around the Atka (a German tech/grind/experimental band) full-length that came out earlier this year. I’ve also been doing a lot of production and mixing for different bands, so I try not to absorb too many new things while doing that, as to keep my ears clean and fresh. Sometimes I’ll reference another mix to get the production more listener-friendly, but I’ll rarely get deep into a record while doing that.
- All songs from previous albums and in this recent one, are titled Images. Like sketches or frames of sonic madness. What was the concept behind it?
Owen: The idea was inspired by Fantômas, who used “Scenes”. We had no idea how to title the songs when we did our first record, so we thought Images were really fitting. We also like how people can interpret the music freely without having actual titles and lyrics. The plan is to do an album with actual titles next, so stay tuned for that one!
Text and Interview: Cláudia Zafre
Band: Ikea Mutilation Manual (Owen)
Images: Covers of Ikea Mutilation Manual Albums
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