by pfnz
we’ve put on a band that’s not particularly average, so to say.
i’m one of the few that’s been there from the beginning and i’ve seen people come and go, but one thing always stayed the same: the reason why we do this.
Listen to the album while reading the text.
music, it’s all about music
for those who don’t know us, you never will. we’re not willing to share any information on our persons, names, faces, places, no sir; what you get from us is music and if that bothers you… well, we’re happy. there’s many reasons for this but the first and most important is that we’re sick of musicians worrying more about the way they appear than about the way they sound. music is our way to express ourselves and we’d want our listeners to focus on what we want to say instead of our ugly faces. yes, we’re ugly, deal with it.
some people have asked about our first album, we tell them it’s lost and never to be found again, which is half the truth. back then we just wanted to make some freaky music, all of us being into extreme rock (noise, death metal, grindcore, industrial) as much as into progressive and psychedelic stuff. for the first couple of albums we couldn’t record drums so we used digital programming on both ‘pfnz’ and ‘pfnz ii’, then finally got a way to do it when we did ‘pfnz iii’, though it was quite tricky: we only had a two-input audio interface so we had to microphone most of the drums through an old 6-track mixer on which we got an acceptable sound that we fed stereo to the audio interface. oh yes, we were quite happy when we could finally multitrack the drums but that wouldn’t happen before ‘at dawn i saw the ashes’ and that album sucks. we’re pretty open about it, that album and ‘sir puke’ were experiments that didn’t really work out, in a way they represent a big, primary element of pfnz: failure.
playing live
funny thing about this band, there are no actual roles. at least for the first phase of the band, before the 2013 split-up, we all played pretty much anything, mainly bass, synth and percussion. but, since i’ve always been interested in writing, i’m the one who wrote most of what you read from us, lyrics, website, this thing here. we split up ‘cause we had nothing to say at the time and because of people being assholes, leaving the band during the recording of ‘at dawn i saw the ashes’ and compromising that whole project. yeah, we really don’t like that album. (and, if you don’t know it, its full title is ‘at dawn i saw the ashes of the old ones scattered on the ground and stolen from the wind by my blood’. ‘dawn’ is also accepted.)
we only played one real gig for our 10th anniversary in january 2018 and it was great, we recorded it and you all can listen to it even though it was invite-only and, of course, no one has seen our faces on the stage.
that was one emotional moment, playing songs from the first albums brought us back to the time when we wrote that stuff. i remember a moment during ‘the way out’, the 25-minute suite we used to open the second set, when we all turned towards the center of the stage and for a moment it was like everything around us disappeared, four people just doing what they do best, channelled into a song that represents a lot for us personally. we even gave new life to some songs we thought were really bad but, once we gave them a new dress, they looked nastier than ever. we really wanted to annoy the audience with loud volumes and killer feedbacks, we even threw some cds in the crowd to see if we could hurt them and left the stage two hours later without ever speaking a word to them.
a quadruple concept album
it may seem like we’re assholes, and we are, we really are, but there is one rule to be in this band: you have to be in it for the music and nothing else. honestly, i’ve been and am in other projects and each and every one of them has something, even the slightest, little thingy, that draws a bit of attention away from the music. in pfnz that never happens.
now we just published a quadruple concept album, i think that’s something.
we worked our asses off for a whole year to complete it, i’ve worked on the story too and i (we) think that, though some may not find it our best work, it is without doubt our most emblematic record: each album was played by a different line-up with different instruments, we went from hysterical overblown death metal/noise/industrial blasting to alien ambient meditations, through freak/prog suites and synth-pop choruses, it definitely shows what we can do and now we’ve got something to top for the future.
talking of future. well, i don’t know and we don’t know, anything, really.
for the nature of the project, we could disappear for years or forever, or maybe we’ll make a new record next month, because we want to. there’s probably something in between those two futures where we’ll make music and spread it out, there’s just some things i’m sure about: i don’t know who will write it nor who will play it, sing it or record it, i don’t know if we’ll scream or sing, i don’t know if we’ll ever have (or care to have) a label, i don’t know if we’ll ever play another gig nor where and why.
but one day we will die, that’s what i’m sure about.
as always,
yay.