The Two-headed drone-doom-noise monster known as BORG from Budapest recently released a pair of crushing E.P.’s titled “The Boo, Pt. 1” and “The Boo, Pt 2”.
I caught up with band members Marci and Dia to talk about their early musical experiences, how they got together and the making of the new records.
CMM-What was the first music that really made an impact on you all as kids and what artists or bands did you all enjoy the most?
Marci: It could have been some Alvin and the Chipmunks style weirdness, but I ruined the tape by accidentally pouring coke into the walkman.
On the playground I was singing Kiss and Bon Jovi hits after the radio, without, of course, understanding a single word. I was still a kid when my parents took me with them to a festival, I felt the bass and the kick beats in my lungs, that feeling stuck with me ever since. Later I got into metal, I remember how, in my brother’s room we were listening to a worn-out Nailbomb tape and ripped System Of A Down CD’s on a boombox.
When I got my first guitar at 17, I was simultaneously looking at Alter Bridge tabs with one friend and forming a short-lived Grave Digger tribute with an other. Around this time I was very much into viking metal as well, like Tyr or Ensiferum and such.
Anyway, we’re both 90’s kids, so perhaps our greatest shared influence is Linkin Park.
Dia: I studied classical music for 12 years on violin, but meanwhile, when I was 13, my uncle copied Metallica’s St. Anger album for me, and well… let’s just say a whole new world opened up in front of me – one I’ve been very happy to exist in ever since, more and more. So yeah, what really holds us together is our shared taste in music.
We’re both huge NIN fans, we love gloomy doom, dark jazz, and we used to be quite into stoner too – although we’ve got a little tired of that by now. We also get a lot of inspiration from instruments themselves.
Marci, for example, is like some kind of mad scientist, constantly building and soldering strange things at home. Right now we’re planning to make a double-stem glowing headset microphone for vocoder use.
CMM-How did the band get together and start crafting your sound?
Dia: The first time was completely random – I just ran up on stage behind Marci. Before one of their live acts, he had casually mentioned that if I felt like it, I could join in. There were some rather impatient faces in the audience who didn’t react too well to the experimental ambient stuff, so I decided to go up, hit hard, and we made metal.
Marci: Not long after that, Dia rescued a pigeon from a lightwell, and while we were talking about it, we decided to start a band. This was around 2022.
And we just started playing. We had long improvisation sessions sometimes reaching into dawn, we found inspiration in our plans and our music’s universe, in everything we listened to, and the material of our first album, BIOM, was pretty much ready within months.
CMM -The band recently released two E.P.’s called “The Boo Pt .1” and “The Boo Pt. 2”. What was the writing and recording process for those releases like? Any particular gear or instruments you used during the recording sessions that helped inspire you?
Marci: Musicians kept approaching us in our first years, with their offers to join and after a while we started entertaining the idea of expanding the band. That’s how The BOO, Pt.1 came to be: we worked on it with Bart Speedy and his enormous bass rig. He used three speaker cabs with about 15 speakers in total, driven by hundreds of Watts – you can imagine what our live shows were like.
After recording the Pt. 1, Borg remained a duo, that’s the most fitting for us. We adapted some tracks of the Pt. 1, added some new ideas, and we got The BOO, Pt.
In the meantime I integrated some gear in our live performances that I used while producing BIOM – our first release –, as well as a Moog DFAM – my favourite percussive synth – and we ended up with a huge rack, spreading its cables all around us.
Like, my guitar already had a controller linked to both the synths and the pedalboard, but now we have a sensor on the kick, an effect mic on the snare, headphones for monitoring and so on. About the recording process, we do everything ourselves. Instead of a proper studio we record at our rehearsal place – there are dozens of bands around us, some of them really gave us a hard time when we needed silence.
I slowly expanded my mic collection – Pt. 1 could pass as a Superlux advertisement, now I have some better stuff. We track everything live, just as we would play at a gig, to keep our recordings alive.
Dia: When Marci and I started the band, I told him about the world of my comic – about these transformed creatures – and somehow we started illustrating that world with our music. That’s basically how our concept albums so far came to life.
The comic itself is called The Boo, which is also the title of the double album. One of its main characters is Patrik – the glowing-eyed, tentacled creature you can see on the cover of our first album, BIOM.
In a way, we also consider him the third member of Borg. Thematically, The Boo Pt.1 takes place more in the desert – in the story, this is when the creatures come out of the sand and start forming an army. The Boo Pt. 2 was inspired more by the city scenes: the speed, the chaos, and the broken-off creatures there. That’s where the more industrial sound comes from.
CMM-If the band could score any film director’s movie who would it be and what would the film be about?
Dia: It’s actually funny, because this is very current for us: we were just asked to write the music for a short horror film, and we’ve been recording it in the past few days. The film was inspired by one of Lovecraft’s short stories, so it feels pretty close to our world.
Marci: ”If thrash metal were launched into space” – that’s what we said jokingly, while struggling with describing our music. I can easily imagine doing some obscenely raw and noisy soundtrack for some straight-to-VHS sci-fi, perhaps some Ed Wood inspired horror madness.
Or, while we’re at sci-fi, I’d also love to score some space western, like Cowboy Bebop – or perhaps something along the line of neo-noir, something cyberpunk-themed? And, by the way, we even have our own story, the one Dia wrote.
CMM-What do you have coming up next?
Dia: Right now we’d like to play more outside Budapest as well. We feel like we’ve already gone through most of the smaller clubs here, so now we’d like to see the other bigger cities in Hungary too.
We’re also open to playing abroad. We have a show with two dancers, one of them is Czech, and we’ve talked about taking that performance to Prague. For my part, I’d really like to push our merch further – screen-printed T-shirts are coming next, we’re putting the final touches on our first music video, and of course the comic is also something people have been waiting for. We really like doing things in this DIY way.
Not necessarily because of the costs, but because the two of us can actually build not only the music, but also the communication and the whole visual world around it. I studied graphic design, Marci is a journalist, I like filming, and he learned live sound and recording.
So it all kind of makes sense this way.
Marci: While I write these lines, there’s a surprisingly loud trombone player practicing in the next room, which reminds me, maybe we should start with moving the band to a more appropriate place? Anyhow, we have tons of unfinished ideas to work on, we will come up with even more in the meantime, be it music, video or zines for worldbuilding.
I thought that after releasing The BOO, we’ll have a calm period, but that doesn’t seem to be the case: we already have plenty to work on for the next few years.
