In the Studio: Black Sun

How did the collaboration come about?

Russell: We found out we were both playing Roadburn [Festival] last year in Holland, and we’ve been fans of Oxbow for a long time. We got in touch with Eugene, who was there doing his spoken word solo…

Eugene:…for The Fight Book.

R: Yeah, so we thought it was a perfect opportunity – ‘any chance we could collaborate on something?’ – that was as far as I kinda said initially. We’ve been developing this album for quite a while, and we already had some demo versions of the song Tabula Rasa. It’s quite structured, so I was able to give Eugene my lyrics as well. I wasn’t really stuck on him having to use them or using his own lyrics or write anything necessarily. It was kind of a good, fun thing to do.

E: Yeah, but see, our idea of fun…

R: …is someone else’s idea of hell. (laughter)

E: Usually, I refuse to sing someone else’s words. This is probably the first time ever that I've done that. It speaks more to my failure to have some sort of emotional connection to whatever’s going through your head when you wrote your words, but in their case the words and the music…it’s more like a wonderful propaganda speech. (laughter)

R: I know that people think we’re on a downer all the time in Black Sun – that ‘they’re heavy guys and they’re from Glasgow and they fight’ and things like that. We may sing the blues, but we certainly don’t live the blues.

E: …because you can sing the blues.

R: Yeah we try and have a good time, all the time.

Anything else about the new record?

R: We’ve got two new labels – Future Noise and Head Of Crom from Manchester. Those guys are enthusiastic so it’s really refreshing. After the full-length comes out we hope to get over to Europe for some shows. We’re also going to be doing some noise releases that will be coming out on cassette.