1. Hello and welcome to Panic Dots – please introduce yourselves!

Nina: We are The Unkindness Of Ravens. Nina Wagner and Ben Raine.  We’re an electro rock band from North East London.

2. There are only two of you in the band – is it harder for you guys to generate a bigger sound live?

Ben: We make a lot of noise.  It’s not a problem being two people.  We’ve got electronic drums pumping out, and although it’s a bass I’m playing, I can do more with that and a load of effects than a lot of guitar bands can with a standard line-up. The space around these things is vital. You gotta’ leave the songs with some space to breathe, to reveal themselves, and with strong interplay between the bass, the drums and the vocals, you’ve got all you need.

3. You’re releasing five singles, once every month from May onwards. Why did you decide to do this and not release and album or an EP instead?

Nina: We’re releasing five singles supported by five free download tracks over five months, we could have put it out as an album or whatever but it’s about giving each song the chance to fend for itself.  People take the tracks they want from whatever format it’s presented to them anyway; for now this is just a good way of introducing ourselves and showing what we’re capable of because each single is a different angle of our sound.

4. You’ve stated influences ranging from Queens of the Stoneage to The Prodigy yet some may class you under the “electro” genre. How would you describe your sound?

Ben: Our third single of the five – Prototype - is guitar-free, it’s 100% electro, and that’s a direction we’re going to explore more.  But the cornerstone of our sound is garage rock.  At the start all I wanted to do was combine the sounds I get a kick out of the most, elements from bands like Sonic Youth, Leftfield, The White Stripes, The Future Sound Of London.  There are a lot of things we can’t do as a two-piece with the bass as the main instrument and keeping it all live, but it’s working within the limitations that make it cool.  I don’t have to play guitar to remain within the idea of our sound, but I don’t think I’ll ever get over playing dirty riffs on my bass.

Nina: The heavier, the dirtier, the grungier, the darker the music, the happier I become.  For me there’s always more room for darker sounds, wherever they come from, because that’s where I feel more comfortable and reach enlightenment as an artist.

5. The Unkindness of Ravens is a great band name – how did you come up with it?

Ben: It’s like ‘a murder of crows’, the collective noun for a bunch of ravens is called ‘an unkindness’.  I don’t really care about that, I just heard it and loved the sound of it, I was waiting for years to use it in a song or something, and then when I decided to do this band I used the name as the starting point – a great title is the best place to start.

6. Apart from ravens…  what other birds would you consider unkind?

Ben: Well I don’t really know a lot about birds, but Werner Herzog has this dark recurring chicken imagery in his films, I quote: “Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity, it is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.” Pretty intense huh?

7. If you guys could write the soundtrack to any film, which would it be?

Nina: If we could redo the soundtrack to Lost Highway that would be cool – anything by David Lynch. Composing a Bond theme is pretty much the Holy Grail.

8. You’ve got a very DIY ethic when it comes to music making, preferring to do everything yourselves, do you think this is indeed the way forward for smaller bands? Do you have any desire at all to sign a record deal of some sort?

Nina: DIY is the way to go because we have control in all areas and at this point as an upcoming artist it’s not a bad thing to understand the business side of it.  If you can be successful on your own you might as well continue doing it on your own.

Ben: I wasted enough time in previous bands chasing record deals; it’s all bullshit anyway. What we’re doing has a purity about it, there are no commercial barriers involved. We can release what we want whenever we want and there’s no one standing in the doorway between us and the people who dig what we’re doing.  One day things may need to change but for now we’ve got a tonne of material and I just want to release it fast and keep it coming in as many engaging ways as we can think of.

9. Are there any bands currently on the scene you’d love to work / tour / play with?

Ben: I think Health are pretty cool.  Comets On Fire are the last band I got heavily into, but they seem to be on a break or something.

Nina: To open for Nine Inch Nails would be pretty fucking wicked!

10. Finally, please name something or someone that makes you laugh and something or someone that makes you cry.

Ben: Nina makes me laugh; I think I make her cry.

Nina: Music makes me cry and smile. Shitty sound engineers make me cry and a fucking awesome audience makes me smile!

The first of The Unkindness of Ravens’ five singles – Dead Air – is released on May 3rd 2010. Keep checking the band’s official website for more details…