Author: Rok Klemše
Interview date: 12.04.2008
The legendary Jesenice band Game Over released the cult demo tape Tilt in 1990, and it won over Slovenian metalheads at the time. In just a few short years they recorded a good number of original tracks and played plenty of well-attended gigs. Around 1992 the band fell apart, and apart from the memories of the local metal crowd, practically every trace of Game Over vanished, while Tilt remains a collector’s item to this day. Last December, though, Game Over announced their comeback and surprised everyone with the single version of Eclectric – The Version. Musically they’ve swum into the waters of, roughly speaking, fusion, with the influences of the old Game Over still going strong. In April the stunning Eclectric came out, and it’s absolutely worth buying, which made it an even bigger honor to sit down with the core of today’s Game Over – Aleksander Miklič, Gregor Rožič and Klemen Gasar. What we talked about, you’ll find in the lines below.
RockLine: You’ve just released Eclectric. How’s the response so far? From what I’ve seen, it’s pretty good, even excellent.
Aleksander: I’d say very positive, actually surprisingly good. Considering what Game Over was known for before and what it’s known for now, I think the response is good. Even from people who might have been expecting the older style.
Grega: Despite the shift in style and genre, the response is pretty surprising.
Aleksander: Surprising mostly because it’s not that widely covered in the media, and right now we’re following the reactions mainly through our home page, which is still being built. So the positive feedback is mostly on a personal level and on internet forums. I also heard from someone who knew us as the old Game Over, and even though he doesn’t know us as that band anymore, he told me he likes our new style. Things are going pretty well. In the media it’s moving slowly, but then again we recorded Eclectric slowly too. We expect that, partly because of that, there won’t be some huge reaction any time soon.
RockLine: You started playing again after almost twenty years.
Klemen: A bit less than that…
Aleksander: We started showing up in public after about fifteen years, although this material took quite a while to come together. We’ve been living with it for four, five years.
RockLine: In the nineties you also played in other bands, and one of them was Fil Rouge.
Aleksander: That’s right, Fil Rouge is probably the band mentioned most often, but unfortunately it doesn’t have any proper recordings. I think we’ve got some demo recordings stashed away somewhere, but sadly nothing really concrete. A friend is trying to track down a live recording, but I don’t know if she’s found it yet. It would be great if that recording turned up.
RockLine: If I’m not mistaken, it was in Fil Rouge that you started developing the sound that today’s Game Over has.
Aleksander: Yeah, partly. A big factor was the different instrumentation, adding percussion and synthesizers, which changed the sound substantially. The other side of changing the sound was the jam sessions. Through playing in jam sessions we kept everything that was useful and moved forward with it.
RockLine: And actually today you also work mainly through jam sessions, and that’s how most of the material comes about?
Aleksaner: Yeah, Eclectric itself came out of jam sessions too.
RockLine: So all the material came about spontaneously?
Aleksander: Yeah, all the material came about spontaneously, and then it got shaped into the tracks you can now hear on the album.
Grega: If some part of a jam session is tangible, we keep it, since everything gets recorded. We recorded every rehearsal, then listened back and put a track together.
RockLine: As Game Over you officially released only the demo tape Tilt in 1990, and then you split up fairly quickly within a few years. What exactly happened, and what led to the breakup?
(laughter)
Aleksander: Military service, twice, musical drifting apart, and the original drummer moving to Koper. That’s quite a few factors that played into the split, including some of the members studying. The fact is, though, that soon after the breakup we started getting together for jam sessions again, but we were never focused as a band.
RockLine: As a bonus CD in the Eclectric package, you’ve also included the EP HATrED, which is now out for the first time.
Aleksander: That’s true. Some of the recordings had already been circulating on the internet, because some people had them on tapes. Those recordings were then rescued from the tapes and burned onto CDs that we only had for ourselves, but they still ended up in the hands of people who uploaded them to various FTP servers, and plenty of folks have already downloaded them. Still, there wasn’t a lot of it out there, and at Klemen’s initiative we decided to release HATrED. We remastered the EP and put it out in a limited run. HATrED isn’t included in all versions of Eclectric, only in really limited quantities. It’s a remaster of the original EP. We didn’t decide to play it again. As Klemen said, it’s questionable whether we’d even still be capable of that (laughter).
RockLine: How would you compare the writing and recording process of Game Over from the late eighties/early nineties with the process of today’s Game Over?
Aleksander: Like night and day (laughter). There’s no comparison. First, there’s the musical maturity and the recording gear; today’s technology allows far more even at home. You can work on a thing for much longer, and the result is proportionally better. Back then you had a certain amount of money and, as a result, limited studio time. You came in, played, and what you got was what you got.
Grega: Whether the engineer even knew how to capture the sound was also questionable.
Aleksander: There’s an anecdote about that: a few years ago Dali and I were at the radio station transferring recordings off the tapes to save them, and his first reaction was to crank the bass knob all the way up and ask whether anyone back then even knew how to record this stuff. That’s just how it was; very few people knew the kind of music we were playing. This time we took a lot of time and wanted to record it so that it really sounds right, so you listen with pleasure and like coming back to it. Today plenty of people know how to record well; the main criticism we got was that a production of such deep music couldn’t be played live. The polishing down to the last detail was only the finishing touch, to make the whole thing look truly perfect.
RockLine: You did the production and recording at Dali’s, but you also recorded quite a lot yourselves?
Aleksander: That’s right. We recorded half of it ourselves, and at Dali’s we only did the acoustic drums and the distorted guitars plus a few minimal extras. You’ll be able to find out more about the recording once the home page is done.
RockLine: There’ll be some “behind the scenes” stuff from the Eclectric sessions on the site too, right?
Aleksander: Yep. Considering that certain people know how long we worked on this, we decided to give some kind of explanation.
RockLine: Quite a few guests play on Eclectric, the so-called Eclectric Ensemble, from Frenk Rožič on sax to Dyz (Negligence), who trades a few solos with Klemen on Lost… …and Scapes. Did you seek them out deliberately, are they friends of yours…
Grega: In the end we were working through certain themes and thinking about how to add the finishing touch to each track, so we reached out to people we know. Where drums and guitars fit a track, we added them, and that’s that.
RockLine: Did you have it in mind from the start that Eclectric would be an instrumental record, did you decide that because of the music itself, or just didn’t find the right vocalist (apart from the occasional vocals – Ghosts, author’s note)?
Grega: Yeah, none of us is much of a singer, and the lack of vocals didn’t bother us, we didn’t really miss them. We used vocals only as a part, an addition to the story, the theme.
Aleksander: Like an instrument.
RockLine: Eclectric sounds like it was made by some seriously heavyweight musicians, yet there are a few goofy bits hiding on the album, like the laughter that was supposedly inspired by Monty Python.
Grega: (laughter) Yep, that’s down to Monty Python.
Aleksander: That truth came out quickly (laughter).
Grega: You probably caught the end of the album?
RockLine: I did (laughter). You also put a big emphasis on the packaging and the design itself, and HATrED is even a replica of a vinyl.
Aleksander: Yeah, that’s slowly becoming standard. Though it seems to me this kind of design arrived relatively late; it could have been used ten years ago.
Grega: HATrED has a completely different design from Eclectric, which is why it’s hidden inside the sleeve.
RockLine: Given that you’ve got quite a few years of music behind you, how do you see the Slovenian scene? Aleksander: If we look at the metal scene, quite a few quality bands have popped up since our day. We’ve taken our own path, which some might consider risky, but for us it’s a challenge, or rather authorial satisfaction. We didn’t hold back and we didn’t box ourselves in.
Grega: We can all put our names to this release with a clear conscience, and it covers the Game Over era from A to Z, from Tilt through HATrED to today. We kept the name because of the old material and other circumstances; the Game Over name did leave a historical mark, after all.
RockLine: Even on Eclectric, the influence of the old Game Over can still be heard strongly at times, especially in the guitars.
Aleksander: Yeah, maybe Klemen is exactly the common thread there. I may have gone the furthest from the original scene, but we still worked together. In the beginning this material had no drummer, so I was doing other things and Klemen couldn’t have me as a guitar partner, so he played on ahead by himself, while I took care of drums and keyboards. Ah, exclusively guitar synths, which is a challenge of its own. A synthesizer is still a synthesizer, but it’s not a classic one, since with a guitar synth everything still depends on the vibration of the strings, which is a bit of a gamble too.
RockLine: Really, the whole of Eclectric is a very daring, bold move, which is also why the music isn’t easy on the ears.
Grega: It isn’t, but the common thread of the album is our own inner satisfaction, and what comes out comes out.
RockLine: RViPVO (Ratno Vazduhplovstvo i Protivvazdušna Odbrana; in short, the military air force – author’s note) is from the JNA, right?
Aleksander: That’s right! We’ll present the influences behind the tracks on our site, but I can reveal that RViPVO was a poster we had on the wall, and that poster is basically the track in another form.
RockLine: Who would you count among your influences, both for the old and the new Game Over?
Grega: Too many to name.
Aleksander: Totally. If I just look at my home record collection, or Grega’s or Klemen’s, the range of genres is endless.
Grega: Except pop (laughter).
Aleksander: The influences are endless and we don’t get into it, because the music is so stylistically varied.
RockLine: What are the plans for Game Over going forward? Are you planning any gigs?
Aleksander: Right now it’s mainly promoting the record. We’re focused on the Slovenian scene first; wherever the conditions suit us, we’ll make arrangements. The plan is to present the material in a slightly different light, so that we’re happy with it too, and I hope we manage to record a good gig as well. Since the tracks may sound slightly different live, we’d like to have a live recording too.
RockLine: Audio or video?
Aleksander: We’re mainly focused on audio; there are no plans for a music video for now. The video will probably get shot first by some guy in the crowd at a gig.
Grega: Just like with the record, where we’re happy with the result, that’s how the other activities will go too. We’re not weighed down by managers or labels; we do what we want, the way we want.
RockLine: And will you try to find a label?
Grega: No.
Aleksander: Not within these frameworks right now. But if something suitable comes up, we’ll talk further.
Klemen: It doesn’t depend only on us.
RockLine: That’s it. Thanks a lot for the interview.
Game Over: Thank you!
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Interviewer: Rok Klemše
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