INTERVIEW: PAUL BALLO
Despite being only 22 years-old, Paul Ballo is already an established name on the Romanian alternative scene, having been a part of five bands already. He started out as a drummer for Go to Berlin, The Amsterdams and Kumm. Not satisfied with doing just one thing, he changed directions and created electropop act Hot Casandra and, together with his Go to Berlin ex-bandmate, Matei Teposu, he started Trouble Is. And, to make it clear, Paul is not wasting time. After a video with Trouble Is for Cold Machine, a mini-tour in the UK with fellow band The Amsterdams, he’s working hard to release both an album and a video as Hot Casandra.
You’ve recently had your first live show as Hot Casandra, opening for The Amsterdams. How did you get to play with them and how was it?
We had a mini-tour in the UK together and I just told them that I want to open for them when they take out their second album. Up until then, I had had some DJ sets here and there, and I was sort of ready to play a live concert. I’m going to release an album soon and I had six tracks ready and I thought I should play them live, as an opening act for The Amsterdams, to see how people respond, sort of like a test.
And how did the test go?
It went ok. With us, what happens on stage is a bit different than with other bands, those with a bas, guitar, drums and so on. We’re more electro and we didn’t know how it was going to sound in Kulturhaus [club in Bucharest], but it was really ok and the crowd had a very good reaction to the music.
Could you tell us a bit about the UK tour with The Amsterdams? The audience, the way they reacted, what you thought about it in general, things like these.
In general, you think that it’s very interesting and fun to go play in another country for an audience you don’t know, there are no more familiar faces, people you see all the time and so on. It’s really fun to play for a different crowd than the usual one, but without being promoted it’s really… I mean, you get to play for a new audience, but it could happen to be a sparse one, because, for instance, a band from Romania who wants to sound like bands from the UK, to be honest, may not be interesting for them. The point is you have to be promoted in order to get there and you really could sing Maria Lataretu [Romanian folklore music singer] even, something good will happen. Well, you have to sing in English, though.
You were saying something about an EP as Hot Casandra. How is that going?
The tracks have been ready for a few months, December 2010 to be more precise, and I plan on releasing them.But until I don’t get a good mix, until those songs aren’t good enough by the current standards, it’s not ok to release anything. And I want to get there, and when that happens, I’ll release an EP. I’ve promised that I will release them by the beginning of the year, but I still need time to work on the sound.
Will any of the songs you’ve released so far be on the EP or only new ones?
Nothing that I’ve released online as a demo or remix or anything like that will be on the EP. Just songs I’ve played at least twice live from now on until I take out the album. It’s going to be a five-tracks EP, I hope I won’t change my mind and record an album… or I do hope I will. Maybe sometimes this autumn. It won’t take any longer and, until then, you can hear them performed live.
What influences you when you write a song?
Even walking down the street, I hear things that influence me. I don’t know, if I hear these guys [there was a group behind us] laughing, it influences me. Without planning it, a lot of things influence me, not just the music I listen to. Even when I play something like, I don’t know, A-HA, or Korn, or Maria Lataretu, cause I’ve mentioned her earlier. The music might not influence me so much as the sounds I hear. And maybe that’s why some songs are more difficult to understand, in that I want to get a more interesting sound, something else besides verse-chorus-verse-chorus-verse-chorus, you know. I’m influenced by many things, including the music, including the people I interact with.
What about the actual process of writing a song. Do you just write songs whenever you get ideas or you go in the studio and try to write something there?
I think that when you push yourself to come up with something, it’ll never happen. But it depends on what you want to do, if you’re Timbaland or a producer like Bob Rock or whomever. Then you have to do it, to lock yourself in a studio and wait for an idea to come to you, or else you won’t make money. If you go down this path, it’s ok, but you probably won’t be writing songs just for yourself or… I don’t know the whole process. Most of the times, I get ideas even when I’m on the street, and as I’ve said, anything influences me, even that car that’s driving by us now, I’ll find an interesting sound anywhere. I usually have a recorder with me and I sample a lot of things in the street. Then I go home and, starting from a very basic idea, which might not say a whole lot to other people, I try and create something. If something speaks to me, if I get an idea for the vocals, I’ll record the vocal part and add instruments afterwards. Usually it all happens at home, so it’s all homemade, in that I don’t need other people to do things and I don’t have to argue with them whether this idea is ok or not. I record the songs and, if they don’t sound as good as I’d like them to sound, I give them away as demos.
Let’s talk a bit about Trouble Is. The song you released a few months ago, Cold Machine, has just been picked up by radio stations. Why did that happen, this delay between the release and actual airplay?
You know, Cold Machine also came out of nothing. I mean, we had an idea and just recorded the song and sent it to a friend who worked at the radio station then. He knew the staff and gave them the song without asking us. And the song ended up being played on the radio last summer or spring and we didn’t like that a demo was getting airplay. We then tried to re-recorded it and this took quite a while and when it was actually ready, because of the delay, the guys over at the radio station didn’t want to play it. Some enjoyed the demo version more, we didn’t like the demo and it was this thing about the sound more than anything else. I mean, how it fitted in the current music scene as a song as opposed to how it sounded. It was a technical delay, so to say, on our behalf.
Do plan on releasing anything with Trouble Is in the near future?
We’ve been working on some songs we started writing about a year and a half and we don’t know yet whether we’ll just play them live or release them as singles with a video. We’re still working on them so that they’d sound just as we want them to and after that we’ll see what we’ll do. We don’t know yet.
With Trouble Is you already have a video. Did you think of one for a Hot Casandra song?
Yeah, and I want to take it out right before the launch of the EP. It’ll probably be for… Well, we were supposed to film it by now… It’ll be for a song called Larissa, which is going to be a hit [he smiles]. It didn’t happen yet, but this one’s gonna have a video probably.
Do you think there’s a real possibility to make a living from concerts and album sales in Romania?
Yeah. Don’t you see it? I mean, don’t you see others doing so? Sadly, I don’t have breasts and I am not Marius Moga [Romanian pop musician and producer]. Maybe if my name were Marius Moga, more people would come to my shows or I’d do things for others that would get me more money. But I guess that you can make money out of these small gigs as well. It gets down to the same problem, if you’re not promoted, you can’t make any money, except for playing in Londophone, Control, Suburbia [all clubs in Bucharest] and god knows where. Without being promoted, you could be Kylie Minogue’s sister and nothing will ever happen.
Do you see yourself involved in a project that is completely different from what you’ve done so far?
I always want to be involved in different things. I have plenty of time and I want to work with people who have something to say. I don’t want to be in a band where I do things that I’ve done before, or at least not with the same motives or promotion. I want to do something that will be successful, I want to know that something good is happening, whether it is pop, rock, electro. Yeah, I would get involved in anything, because I like a lot of things, but I want to know that it’s worth doing it.
