We are the Dissociative Identity Quartet.
We have released music individually, been given attention to our persons and come to realise attention of that sort gives us nothing. The quality of a piece will not change depending on the identity of the creator.

We are currently releasing our debut album on Cruel Nature Records (thank you Steve for everything) and slowly working on new material. Who knows maybe we will not be a mayfly, and, in the end, we will do this dance once again.

Where did you come from and where are you going?

I would like to claim I come from my mother’s womb. Cannot say I remember much from those days, but they must have shaped me in some way or form.

I believe our introduction says it all. We all had released stuff, not by any means to any success, but stuff. We all felt it to be some way stressful. Putting your soul into what you make and then sending it out to others can be a both horrifying and exciting procedure. We had conversations on this matter. Plus, how lonely it could feel to do things alone. It is at this point the idea for DIQ raised up from the ashes as an answer to our pondering. Could this be a way to only harvest the good things in the process.

True, now we are trying to find our steps. Was this the answer we were looking for? Will this outfit do it for us? We are recording new material together, or at least trying to. The exciting bit is that we can sound however we feel like. We are different voices, with different ideas. If DIQ stays, it can sound however one of us feels. Everyone must have a saying in approaches and as we are anonymous, we could adopt new members without anyone knowing. I find that to be an interesting idea. So, who knows how we will sound if we release something again?

I for one do not have a clue about where this will take us, and I think that is the beauty of it all.

What preoccupies your mind these days?

I can really go all in on stuff, guess you could blame it on ADHD, but I am super into comics and/or graphic novels, again. It is all I do with my spare time. Reading graphic novels, reading about graphic novels, or buying graphic novels, second hand. Today I bought a whole collection of Alison Bechdel books that I look forward to reading.

Can one ever stop thinking about football? Either it is going down on a weekly basis, or one is waiting for it to go down on a weekly basis. Yet, there is always something to talk and think about, when it comes to football. With that said we have a World Cup coming up in Oceania right now. So, like I said, there is always football.

I am mostly thinking of dust…

Cheeses, am I the only one here thinking about music? What a great second album we will have, if we ever get one done!

Name a favourite taste, touch, sound, sight and smell

Maybe everyone gets one each and then we all can smell something?

Then my answer is that the taste of victory is something special. It’s sweet and so very filling, yet it passes fast like fast carbs. You always need more.

I love the touch of grabbing my badminton racket. Feeling the grip tape and the weight that is practically nothing in the hand. I am not good at it, just recently started playing. But it is pure joy.

The sound of wood crackling in a fire sends me back to my childhood in my granny’s house in the woods. She had no heating in the house and the winters where mighty cold if not for that fireplace.

I like to watch obscure films, but I do have a feeling I should answer the sight of my partners smile, or I’m afraid I won’t see it for a while…

I say the smell of vinyl, especially the first time it comes out of its jacket.

Then I say the smell when opening a book for the first time.

The smell when opening a boardgame box for the first time, well it’s a joy for the eye too.

The correct answer is the smell of a newly tapped IPA.

Describe one of your most vivid dreams or nightmares

I have this nightmare that comes and goes. It is not a visual dream; everything is always pitch black. Instead, it is a strong feeling of how insignificant I am. I am small, useless, and to no good for anyone. I wake up dripping of sweat from that one.

My most vivid dream I ever experienced is without doubt my most embarrassing. As a teenager I stayed at a friend’s summerhouse with his family. In the night I had this dream where we were at a concert. In the middle of the concert, I suddenly really needed to visit the toilet. We were standing just in front of the stage, and I had thousands of people behind me. Pushing my way through to get to the back, while I almost was unable to walk, as my bladder was about to burst. After what felt like an eternity, I made it out of the crowd, and could finally take a leak behind a tree. There I woke up all wet. My friend’s mom was already up and about at this exceedingly early hour, and I had to explain to her what had happened. She did not say anything, just took care of it all, but that only made me feel worse, truly made me feel like I was a small child. She did not tell anyone afterwards either, so my friend never knew what had happened.

I do not know how anyone could continue from this point; I think we leave it at that.

Have you ever had an uncanny experience?

My short answer is yes.
My slightly longer answer is that I used to live with my girlfriend in this tiny flat. One room, a balcony for one, and a bathroom where you would shower over the toilet. It was a lot of strange things going on at this place. One morning when we woke up, we found a shower cap in the bathroom. We tried to explain it to ourselves that the shower cap always had been there, we just had not noticed it. A couple of days later our TV-remote disappeared, never to turn up again. We had one room and very little stuff. so where could it had gone?

Then one night some week later we both woke up around four in the morning by some strange coincident, we looked at each other like you too. Then we both here a voice calling my girlfriend’s name three times. We both was like; did you hear that? I got up and checked outside. Nothing, it was four in the morning. There is absolutely no one around. We did not stay at that place for long after that and found ourselves a new slightly bigger room with a shower over the toilet instead.

I have another one: my wife and I were expecting our first-born and needed a bigger place for the baby. We found this townhouse a bit outside of town at a low rent. We took it directly. The place needed some paint and proper cleaning. The building had two floors. Downstairs there was big lounge, a kitchen and behind it a small room that always felt cold. No matter how many times we closed the door to that room and made sure it was proper closed, we would still find it open the next time we passed the kitchen. Before moving in we started with painting the bedrooms upstairs. The first day there all lights go out on the upper floor at the same time, and it is not a fuse that brakes, it is all the lights braking at the same time. We then joked it must be a ghost in the house. Then the next day we are painting downstairs, listening to music on a small speaker. From nowhere the speaker blows out, completely broken. Only thing to do is throwing it in the bin. This really spooks my wife, but I am still trying to give a logical explanation. In the afternoon that same day we meet a neighbour outside the building. She is a friend of a friend that we had no idea lived in this area. She gives us a stare; are you the new neighbours! Did you know the last tenant hanged himself in the backroom behind the kitchen?

We never moved into that building…

How does your sense of place affect the way you express yourself?

I think this in some way is what we are trying to flee here. Although I am fairly sure that is impossible. I know for a fact I am the result of the culture I grow up in. but when approaching the project as something that is more than me, that isn’t me, I can explore sides of myself and others in another way. It is a bit like when my children roleplay. They take on characters to try them out and getting an understanding of the character and themselves at the same time. Because that is what children do and I think this is what we are doing as grownups right now. We can play and pretend we are anyone we wish to be at the moment and then learn new things along the way as we explore these opportunities of shaping ourselves.

Also, none of us are schooled in any form or way in the instruments we explore. It’s all fun and games. We don’t know music theory or anything and I’m not saying this with pride, we would no doubt like to learn these things, but there is only so many hours in the day. You can’t do it all. We don’t do this to pay the bills, it’s a hobby. So, I would say that this is a sense of place where we come from and that it affects the way we express ourselves deeply.

What has particularly touched or inspired you recently?

I would say the meeting between different individuals. Making music on your own limits you to your way of thinking. So, when others approach you with their ideas, it gives you a chance to try addressing things in new ways. It is a nice secure feeling to be in full control, as in working alone. But I am quite sure we develop the most when we are slightly insecure. That gives us a reason and pushes us to adapt to something new.

Yeah, and then when that insecurity is gone, and you have become in control of everything again – then it is time to push it even further. Trying to always stay in the zone of proximal development as Lev Vygotsky would have put it.  

Tell us a good story, anecdote or joke

I think the joke is on us…

Yeah, I hope the story of us Dissociative Identity Quartet will be a good one. Right now, as we are in the middle of releasing our album, we have made new realisations in our story. Starting a new project and not telling who we are, has made us realise how far we have come in our own projects. We are not telling people we are a part of this, so we cannot carry over any interests from what we have done before. That has made it obvious that we have come much further than we ever would have thought as individuals. So yes, the joke is on us.

Getting out to people is hard. Why should they listen to you? There’s so much music nowadays and we love that. There is a place for everyone. It is much more democratic in this way. But it also makes it harder to be heard when there is so much to listen to. Not complaining here. Making something does not incline you a universal right to be listened to. If people like what you are doing, they will support you. There is so much love and good wishes going around on this stage in the periphery of music as a whole. That is something beautiful we all should cherish. Hopefully, there is a place for a project like this and we can continue to try out different characters as we progress as a unit and then this story will become a much longer one and not just a little anecdote told over a beer in a pub.