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OK,there's a LOT of misunderstandings going on regarding APOP here,so I'll set the record straight right now:
Apoptygma Berzerk are indeed norwegian.The mastermind of the project is called Stephan Groth(He writes all the tracks and produces it all,I think the others are just perfomers on records and live shows),and he has quite a career behind him.Touring the whole of USA,playing at the Burning Man Festival in the middle of the Nevada desert,recording music videos in the same dome as the Mad Max movie was shot,getting his tunes played on porn shows on german tv,landing headfirst into the trance scene with the infamous trance remixes from Ferry,Pulsedriver and Green Court while still gaining immense amounts of cred in the metal scene:Stephan Groth has done it all.
As far as his music is concerned,Stephan Groth calls himself an EBM-artist.(He is NOT a trance artist.The remixes is what made him famous in the trance scene).This means that what he makes can be influenced by absolutely anything,be it trance,heavy metal,electro,techno etc.The core of his music however is still EBM(if not as puristic as the hardcore fans would like him to be),which is some kind of industrial sub-genre with lots of influences from other genres.Most people say this genre died out in the late 80s,but that is still open for debate.
Here are some quotes from an interview Stephan Groth did in Mutek Magazine some time ago:
"As a producer of EBM-minded music,I've been the first one to push the boundaries.And it's good that you can do that. A couple of years ago,I combined trance with EBM,and that worked out quite well.Green Court made a wicked remix,it really opened up for us(PERSONAL NOTE:I think he's mixing this one up with Ferry's),and after that we got remixed by Pulsedriver and Ferry Corsten as well,and suddenly we were standing in the middle of the trance scene,which was a good thing back then."
"For me,it was never a goal to be puristic and single-minded,I think that's pretty commercial.By experimenting musically I managed to get a whole new group of people to listen to my music,since they recognized some of the elements they were already familiar with."
"There are a lot of things that are unique with APOP.The most important thing for me was the vocals,and I've always retained those.The choruses are strict and haven't changed much.Sometimes I make tracks with guitar-sounds,and sometimes I make more trancey tracks.The core in APOP isn't the sounds that are made,it's the vocals and how the tracks are built up.Nowadays for instance,I'm making more funky electro-ish tunes..."
(This was his answer when the interviewer asked him if all the musical experimenting had robbed APOP of all musical identity.)
I hope this cleared things up.
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"Wenn du dich zum Untergrund zählst, reicht es nicht, es nur zu sagen. Du musst auch viel graben, um es zu werden."
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