Nemesis To Go - Interviews: Stories From the Moon

A concept album without a concept, or a collection of surrealist fairy tales? After-dark allegories, or parables from a parallel universe? Stories From The Moon is all of the above, or none of it, and more. It's a musical and narrative collaboration put together by Ben Golomstock, guitarist with Miranda Sex Garden, on which friends and aquaintances (and a few complete strangers) create a twilit world of song, story, and atmosphere. The cast list reads like a who's who of who's interesting in left-field music, with contributions from Katherine Blake of Miranda Sex Garden, KatieJane Garside of Queen Adreena, Nick Marsh of Flesh For Lulu and Andrea Kerr of Colt, among many others.

Although Jaques Brel and David Lynch feature in the songwriting credits, this is very much a collaborative effort by all the people involved, and might surprise those who only know the performers from their day jobs. There's a review of the album here - but the story behind the project is a tale in itself, as Ben Golomstock reveals...

Let's start with some nuts and bolts stuff. Most people will probably know you from Miranda Sex Garden, and others may have encountered your other band, Naked Goat along the way. But I suspect there will be those for whom the trail goes cold after Miranda Sex Garden split up. So, for the benefit of anyone who's just tuned in, how did you get from there to here? What's the story that takes us from Miranda to the Moon?

Miranda Sex Garden never really split up; Coma Years. I recorded a few ideas, Katherine sang on some new stuff, we thought we could have a crack at another CD. We started playing around with it as a band - and I got the sack because I fell asleep in the studio. They tried to get someone else in, but I guess it didn't work out. More Coma Years ensued. It's possible that we might do more stuff, though...

Remarkable that you've heard of Naked Goat - our bass player once said 'God, we're so underground, we're six feet under'. The last rehearsal we did, fittingly, was in a cellar somewhere in Shoreditch. I was napping again. I like my naps. The house caught fire, a rude awakening. We had to evacuate, took anything we could carry, lost a lot of equipment. So that was that. Overall, it was a relief; but then I got music withdrawal, and started recording again.

How all of that ended with the Moon is quite peculiar...

How did the essential idea behind Stories From The Moon come about? Was it something that had been bubbling away in the back of your mind for a long time until, eventually, the circumstances were auspicious \line enough to do it, or was it more of a lightbulb-goes-on-above-the-head moment?

Originally, the Stories From The Moon thing didn't have any idea behind it, not even a clue. Somehow that seems appropriate to the whole project. I had wanted to do a solo thing for years (insert cliche here), although this is hardly that. I don't know what the hell it is. The things that bubble away in the back of my mind are often incomprehensible, even to me, but occasionally they belch themselves out in curious, and hopefully interesting, forms. I'm a big fan of Random; anything with a set plan and agenda ends up sounding dull, contrived and formulaic (although it often charts!). And I have no lightbulb above my head, not directly.

Stories From The Moon - KatieJane Garside To elaborate in a more comprehensible way, KatieJane from Queen Adreena heard the 'Haunted Palace' track, something I'd done a while before, wanted to contribute something to it, and introduced me to MySpace - which ended up playing an important part in itself. People came along, and wanted to do stuff. More recording, lack of sleep. The circumstances were far from auspicious; I was completely broke,became obsessive about this project, lost my flat, and became homeless. When I wasn't crashing on couches, I was trying to sleep in the local cemetery.

I was sick of years of bands, studios, stress, organising rubbish, and so on. I'd been involved in countless projects; after a while, bands become horribly incestuous, lots of human stuff gets in the way of the music, and it all eventually takes its toll. I wanted to get away from all that for a while, so I guess this was the beginning of a sort of virtual band.

I had more or less no equipment, or anything else, come to think of it. I would record anything to hand: glasses, ashtrays, cardboard boxes, junk, and so on. Ended up in a disturbing bedsit, like something out of Eraserhead. Overwhelming sound of the extractor fan from the loo - I recorded that, I think it worked rather well on the 'In Heaven' song. I think I was influenced by a Throbbing Gristle biography I'd read, the whole punk DIY ethic. Alexander Hacke from Neubauten had produced the Miranda Sex Garden album 'Fairytales Of Slavery', and he showed me that anything can sound good if you know what you're doing. Cheesegraters, grinding teeth, pebbles, the entire kitchen, literally. Bless. (Incidentally, Neubauten once spent hours finding the perfect sound of a gun being fired into a toilet bowl. I don't know why I mention this).

I also had shitloads of unreleased material, some of it from years back. Naked Goat stuff, some Miranda ideas, bits and pieces; I thought it would be nice for some of it to see the light of day. I have fond memories of dangling Audrey Evans (who ended up in Mediaeval Baebes) out of the window of our first floor flat to record the vocals on 'Les Chiens', to get the background sound of garbage trucks at dawn. Good times.

How did you assemble the people - all fifteen of them, if I haven't miscounted - who contribute to the project? Were there specific \line people you particularly wanted to work with, specific voices that you thought would suit a particular song? Or did it happen more organically, with the various contributors naturally gravitating to the parts of the project that would suit them best?

Did you adopt the role of director, as it were, and point your collaborators to the songs on which you thought they'd do good stuff, or did you let everyone find their own way, and just let it grow? Was it a real collaboration, with everyone bringing in their own ideas - their own stories? Or was it more like, 'Here's the script, this is what you do'? Listening to the album, it does seem to strike a balance - there's a definite overall feel, a certain atmosphere \line that drifts through everything, but there's also plenty of diversity...

Stories From The Moon - Nick Marsh Most of the people on this are friends of mine who wanted to collaborate on stuff. Some are not. There were no rules; people had absolutely free reign. I'd drifted away from the real world, which I've never got along with very well. Doubt I missed much. I did begin to feel (metaphorically!) that I was living on the moon, and hid in music and on MySpace; so I'd send out random backing tracks to people to see what happened. Come to think of it, there were rules. One: I send you a track. Two: you do anything you like with it. Three: you send it back!

The curious thing was that although some of the backing tracks are very diverse, everybody tapped into something. Although at the time I didn't know what it was. For example, there's a bloke on the net in Canada who wanted to do something, he goes by the name of Johnny Kingfish. He sent me a vocal track that fitted in beautifully. I may never meet him, but I owe him a pint.

It struck me that a lot of the stuff coming in was very personal, and childlike; stories, dreams, nightmares... sort of hypnogogic, and rather pure, for fear of sounding soppy. One of the singers sent me lyrics on a piece of paper that had been scrawled on in a delightful way; one of the next games was to collect a few more personalised bits from people - this stuff ended up as part of the artwork: a sort of scrapbook. I guess that's where Stories From The Moon started to cohere. By this time, everyone had done their bit, and it began to dawn on me that we had this... thing.

There comes the terrible point when a band has time on their hands, gets bored, and begins to argue about rubbish. If this were a real band, I doubt the CD would have ever got released. So for the first time, I only had to argue with myself, which I did with glee. By the end, it made some sort of twisted sense, there was a release and I had to become a record company (oops!). Learning curve!

I'm shying away from the term 'concept album' here, because that always makes me think of the likes of Rick Wakeman making some ghastly opus about orcs and wizards. But there is an underlying idea here - this collection of tales, some only half heard, some only half understood, some plain narratives, some no more than hints and atmospheres. In a way it reminds me of a book my mum has owned from childhood, entitled Danish Fairy Tales. It's a collection of fanciful stories, intended for children, but they're real fairy tales, full of blood and violence and people making pacts with the devil. Certainly not Hans Christian Andersen's neat and sweetened versions, which is what fairy tales became. These are stories that make you want to \line sleep with the light on. That's the area I think Stories From The Moon inhabits...although of course that could be just me. So, is that, or something like it, the con - er, I mean, underlying idea?

Yup! I reckon you got hold of the PG/PC version of Hans Christian Andersen...we reckon that the Brothers Grimm had a contract and a tight deadline, hence the complete 4am nonsense with titles like 'The Duck, The Dog And The Sausage'. And that's a far as the plot goes, more or less. I had to grow up with stuff like Der Struwelpeter and Tyl Ulenspiegel (that one's really nasty stuff; if you haven't read it, you should look it up). Turned me into the fine young man I am today! Some of the British cautionary tales are pretty strong as well, come to think of it.

Crikey, just remembered, I was weaned on traditional Russian fairytales, Baba Yaga and so on (witch in the forest, wooden hut on a giant chicken claw, eats babies, etc), then went on to horror films; I reckon my right brain activity kicked in early, and the left brain recoiled in disgust. Never really surfaced again. One of the delightfully weird things about certain fairy tales is that although they have a very moral form, the actual morality is damn questionable. It's a more grotesque, primal thing - you end up scratching your head in disbelief, thinking 'Why the fuck did that happen?' A bit like real life, I guess...

Odd, there's a trad Scandanavian lullaby on Stories, 'The Trollmother'; Frida Alvinzi, a Swedish friend of mine, used to sing it to me as I went to sleep, which was a very pleasant thing. I got her to do it on Stories From The Moon, and now it still sounds pretty, but oddly creepy and twisted. Different context.

Perhaps the closest that Stories comes to a concept is that there is no concept. I've found that when ground rules are laid down in just about anything, they result in set standards that end up in expectations, frustrations, bitterness, rancour and so on. When I was a kid I was intrigued by Brownian Motion, the principle behind how cigarette smoke is shaped. The molecules in the smoke collide completely randomly; there is never a pattern, but the result is always beautiful. My god, I think I went off on one there.

Andrea Kerr OK, one more bit - the Moon: a symbol of the feminine principle, losing your way, having to trust your intuition and so on. Apposite. I'm sure you get the idea by now, if there is one.

Is there anything else in the works, to take this project a little further? Would it be possible to put together a live show, for example? In the right sort of setting (ie, probably not a regular rock venue) it seems to me there could be an unsettlingly cool performance here. Or perhaps another album, some more strange tales? Or has the story book been closed now...?

I'm currently working on a London club night called Club Hell - Katherine from Miranda Sex Garden is playing the next one. We'll be screening a US documentary called Impaler, about a vampire running for Governor of Minnesota (true!).

A live show of Stories would be practically impossible, for obvious reasons! I'm still taken aback this thing came out at all... Still doing the odd bit of live stuff, though, anything different that takes my fancy. Might start a twisted blues band...

But the next project's coming along. I've set up a little studio, writing sketches for new material. I thought I'd expand on the Random Game I played last time. Same rules, but involving more people from Myspasm who've gravitated to Miranda Sex Garden. There's more discrimination - I know what kinds of vocal tones I'm after for certain things, and so on, but everyone still has free rein. In fact, anyone reading this who might want to have a go, just get in touch. If anyone's interested, this is the game: they write me 3 words or phrases, and I try to write music that sounds like them.

Last year, I assembled a hardcore sitar player, Bic from Levitation on guitar, sax, lute, and a host of other stuff. Right now I've got singers from about 7 different countries, who I will probably never meet, working on demos; it's delightful not knowing what will happen next.

So the horror continues!

Essential Links:

Read the Stories From The Moon album review here.

Buy the album from the Stories Of The Moon Website.

Hear excerpts on the Miranda Sex Garden MySpace page.

Visit Ben Golomstock on MySpace (and send him some contributions for his next project!)

Read a recent live review of Queen Adreena here; photos from the gig are here.

The new EP by Colt is reviewed here.

Back to the Interviews index page.

Picture credits:

Stories From The Moon album artwork by Natalie Shau, Bethany Hazel and Jon Golds.

Photos of Ben Golomstock, KatieJane Garside and Nick Marsh grabbed randomly off MySpace; credits unknown.

Photo of Katherine Blake by Piers Atkinson.

Photo of Andrea Kerr by Ella Charlesworth.

Shameless Photoshopping by Michael Johnson.


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A concept album without a concept, or a collection of surrealist fairy tales? After-dark allegories, or parables from a parallel universe? Stories From The Moon is all of the above, or none of it, and more. It's a musical and narrative collaboration put together by Ben Golomstock, guitarist with Miranda Sex Garden, on which friends and aquaintances (and a few complete strangers) create a twilit world of song, story, and atmosphere. The cast list reads like a who's who of who's interesting in left-field music, with contributions from Katherine Blake of Miranda Sex Garden, KatieJane Garside of Queen Adreena, Nick Marsh of Flesh For Lulu and Andrea Kerr of Colt, among many others. Although Jaques Brel and David Lynch feature in the songwriting credits, this is very much a collaborative effort by all the people involved, and might surprise those who only know the performers from their day jobs. There's a review of the album here - but the story behind the project is a tale in itself, as Ben Golomstock reveals... Let's start with some nuts and bolts stuff. Most people will probably know you from Miranda Sex Garden, and others may have encountered your other band, Naked Goat along the way. But I suspect there will be those for whom the trail goes cold after Miranda Sex Garden split up. So, for the benefit of anyone who's just tuned in, how did you get from there to here? What's the story that takes us from Miranda to the Moon? Miranda Sex Garden never really split up; Coma Years. I recorded a few ideas, Katherine sang on some new stuff, we thought we could have a crack at another CD. We started playing around with it as a band - and I got the sack because I fell asleep in the studio. They tried to get someone else in, but I guess it didn't work out. More Coma Years ensued. It's possible that we might do more stuff, though... Remarkable that you've heard of Naked Goat - our bass player once said 'God, we're so underground, we're six feet under'. The last rehearsal we did, fittingly, was in a cellar somewhere in Shoreditch. I was napping again. I like my naps. The house caught fire, a rude awakening. We had to evacuate, took anything we could carry, lost a lot of equipment. So that was that. Overall, it was a relief; but then I got music withdrawal, and started recording again. How all of that ended with the Moon is quite peculiar... How did the essential idea behind Stories From The Moon come about? Was it something that had been bubbling away in the back of your mind for a long time until, eventually, the circumstances were auspicious \line enough to do it, or was it more of a lightbulb-goes-on-above-the-head moment? Originally, the Stories From The Moon thing didn't have any idea behind it, not even a clue. Somehow that seems appropriate to the whole project. I had wanted to do a solo thing for years (insert cliche here), although this is hardly that. I don't know what the hell it is. The things that bubble away in the back of my mind are often incomprehensible, even to me, but occasionally they belch themselves out in curious, and hopefully interesting, forms. I'm a big fan of Random; anything with a set plan and agenda ends up sounding dull, contrived and formulaic (although it often charts!). And I have no lightbulb above my head, not directly. To elaborate in a more comprehensible way, KatieJane from Queen Adreena heard the 'Haunted Palace' track, something I'd done a while before, wanted to contribute something to it, and introduced me to MySpace - which ended up playing an important part in itself. People came along, and wanted to do stuff. More recording, lack of sleep. The circumstances were far from auspicious; I was completely broke,became obsessive about this project, lost my flat, and became homeless. When I wasn't crashing on couches, I was trying to sleep in the local cemetery. I was sick of years of bands, studios, stress, organising rubbish, and so on. I'd been involved in countless projects; after a while, bands become horribly incestuous, lots of human stuff gets in the way of the music, and it all eventually takes its toll. I wanted to get away from all that for a while, so I guess this was the beginning of a sort of virtual band. I had more or less no equipment, or anything else, come to think of it. I would record anything to hand: glasses, ashtrays, cardboard boxes, junk, and so on. Ended up in a disturbing bedsit, like something out of Eraserhead. Overwhelming sound of the extractor fan from the loo - I recorded that, I think it worked rather well on the 'In Heaven' song. I think I was influenced by a Throbbing Gristle biography I'd read, the whole punk DIY ethic. Alexander Hacke from Neubauten had produced the Miranda Sex Garden album 'Fairytales Of Slavery', and he showed me that anything can sound good if you know what you're doing. Cheesegraters, grinding teeth, pebbles, the entire kitchen, literally. Bless. (Incidentally, Neubauten once spent hours finding the perfect sound of a gun being fired into a toilet bowl. I don't know why I mention this). I also had shitloads of unreleased material, some of it from years back. Naked Goat stuff, some Miranda ideas, bits and pieces; I thought it would be nice for some of it to see the light of day. I have fond memories of dangling Audrey Evans (who ended up in Mediaeval Baebes) out of the window of our first floor flat to record the vocals on 'Les Chiens', to get the background sound of garbage trucks at dawn. Good times. How did you assemble the people - all fifteen of them, if I haven't miscounted - who contribute to the project? Were there specific \line people you particularly wanted to work with, specific voices that you thought would suit a particular song? Or did it happen more organically, with the various contributors naturally gravitating to the parts of the project that would suit them best? Did you adopt the role of director, as it were, and point your collaborators to the songs on which you thought they'd do good stuff, or did you let everyone find their own way, and just let it grow? Was it a real collaboration, with everyone bringing in their own ideas - their own stories? Or was it more like, 'Here's the script, this is what you do'? Listening to the album, it does seem to strike a balance - there's a definite overall feel, a certain atmosphere \line that drifts through everything, but there's also plenty of diversity... Most of the people on this are friends of mine who wanted to collaborate on stuff. Some are not. There were no rules; people had absolutely free reign. I'd drifted away from the real world, which I've never got along with very well. Doubt I missed much. I did begin to feel (metaphorically!) that I was living on the moon, and hid in music and on MySpace; so I'd send out random backing tracks to people to see what happened. Come to think of it, there were rules. One: I send you a track. Two: you do anything you like with it. Three: you send it back! The curious thing was that although some of the backing tracks are very diverse, everybody tapped into something. Although at the time I didn't know what it was. For example, there's a bloke on the net in Canada who wanted to do something, he goes by the name of Johnny Kingfish. He sent me a vocal track that fitted in beautifully. I may never meet him, but I owe him a pint. It struck me that a lot of the stuff coming in was very personal, and childlike; stories, dreams, nightmares... sort of hypnogogic, and rather pure, for fear of sounding soppy. One of the singers sent me lyrics on a piece of paper that had been scrawled on in a delightful way; one of the next games was to collect a few more personalised bits from people - this stuff ended up as part of the artwork: a sort of scrapbook. I guess that's where Stories From The Moon started to cohere. By this time, everyone had done their bit, and it began to dawn on me that we had this... thing. There comes the terrible point when a band has time on their hands, gets bored, and begins to argue about rubbish. If this were a real band, I doubt the CD would have ever got released. So for the first time, I only had to argue with myself, which I did with glee. By the end, it made some sort of twisted sense, there was a release and I had to become a record company (oops!). Learning curve! I'm shying away from the term 'concept album' here, because that always makes me think of the likes of Rick Wakeman making some ghastly opus about orcs and wizards. But there is an underlying idea here - this collection of tales, some only half heard, some only half understood, some plain narratives, some no more than hints and atmospheres. In a way it reminds me of a book my mum has owned from childhood, entitled Danish Fairy Tales. It's a collection of fanciful stories, intended for children, but they're real fairy tales, full of blood and violence and people making pacts with the devil. Certainly not Hans Christian Andersen's neat and sweetened versions, which is what fairy tales became. These are stories that make you want to \line sleep with the light on. That's the area I think Stories From The Moon inhabits...although of course that could be just me. So, is that, or something like it, the con - er, I mean, underlying idea? Yup! I reckon you got hold of the PG/PC version of Hans Christian Andersen...we reckon that the Brothers Grimm had a contract and a tight deadline, hence the complete 4am nonsense with titles like 'The Duck, The Dog And The Sausage'. And that's a far as the plot goes, more or less. I had to grow up with stuff like Der Struwelpeter and Tyl Ulenspiegel (that one's really nasty stuff; if you haven't read it, you should look it up). Turned me into the fine young man I am today! Some of the British cautionary tales are pretty strong as well, come to think of it. Crikey, just remembered, I was weaned on traditional Russian fairytales, Baba Yaga and so on (witch in the forest, wooden hut on a giant chicken claw, eats babies, etc), then went on to horror films; I reckon my right brain activity kicked in early, and the left brain recoiled in disgust. Never really surfaced again. One of the delightfully weird things about certain fairy tales is that although they have a very moral form, the actual morality is damn questionable. It's a more grotesque, primal thing - you end up scratching your head in disbelief, thinking 'Why the fuck did that happen?' A bit like real life, I guess... Odd, there's a trad Scandanavian lullaby on Stories, 'The Trollmother'; Frida Alvinzi, a Swedish friend of mine, used to sing it to me as I went to sleep, which was a very pleasant thing. I got her to do it on Stories From The Moon, and now it still sounds pretty, but oddly creepy and twisted. Different context. Perhaps the closest that Stories comes to a concept is that there is no concept. I've found that when ground rules are laid down in just about anything, they result in set standards that end up in expectations, frustrations, bitterness, rancour and so on. When I was a kid I was intrigued by Brownian Motion, the principle behind how cigarette smoke is shaped. The molecules in the smoke collide completely randomly; there is never a pattern, but the result is always beautiful. My god, I think I went off on one there. OK, one more bit - the Moon: a symbol of the feminine principle, losing your way, having to trust your intuition and so on. Apposite. I'm sure you get the idea by now, if there is one. Is there anything else in the works, to take this project a little further? Would it be possible to put together a live show, for example? In the right sort of setting (ie, probably not a regular rock venue) it seems to me there could be an unsettlingly cool performance here. Or perhaps another album, some more strange tales? Or has the story book been closed now...? I'm currently working on a London club night called Club Hell - Katherine from Miranda Sex Garden is playing the next one. We'll be screening a US documentary called Impaler, about a vampire running for Governor of Minnesota (true!). A live show of Stories would be practically impossible, for obvious reasons! I'm still taken aback this thing came out at all... Still doing the odd bit of live stuff, though, anything different that takes my fancy. Might start a twisted blues band... But the next project's coming along. I've set up a little studio, writing sketches for new material. I thought I'd expand on the Random Game I played last time. Same rules, but involving more people from Myspasm who've gravitated to Miranda Sex Garden. There's more discrimination - I know what kinds of vocal tones I'm after for certain things, and so on, but everyone still has free rein. In fact, anyone reading this who might want to have a go, just get in touch. If anyone's interested, this is the game: they write me 3 words or phrases, and I try to write music that sounds like them. Last year, I assembled a hardcore sitar player, Bic from Levitation on guitar, sax, lute, and a host of other stuff. Right now I've got singers from about 7 different countries, who I will probably never meet, working on demos; it's delightful not knowing what will happen next. So the horror continues! Essential Links: Read the Stories From The Moon album review here. Buy the album from the Stories Of The Moon Website. Hear excerpts on the Miranda Sex Garden MySpace page. Visit Ben Golomstock on MySpace (and send him some contributions for his next project!) Read a recent live review of Queen Adreena here; photos from the gig are here. The new EP by Colt is reviewed here. Back to the Interviews index page. Picture credits: Stories From The Moon album artwork by Natalie Shau, Bethany Hazel and Jon Golds. Photos of Ben Golomstock, KatieJane Garside and Nick Marsh grabbed randomly off MySpace; credits unknown. Photo of Katherine Blake by Piers Atkinson. Photo of Andrea Kerr by Ella Charlesworth. Shameless Photoshopping by Michael Johnson.
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Back to top	Page credits: Picture credits as above. Interview and construction by Michael Johnson. Nemesis logo by Antony Johnston, Red N version by Mark Rimmell.