Just in time to celebrate the end of the spooky season, dark-pop duo Ready, Steady, Die! released their “Darkstar” video on Halloween. Blood Makes Noise recently interviewed this duo (Morgan Visconti and Sam K.) about this new release and more. The interview can be read below.
Who are some of your main musical role models? How did looking up to them shape your own music?
Morgan Visconti: My parents (Tony Visconti and Mary Hopkin) are the most influential role models on my musical path. When I was very young, I heard the music they worked on take shape so aside from the actual music, the process of making records became a huge interest to me. Looking back, I sometimes forget how influential that music was to other artists as well. The music of David Bowie, The Sparks, Thin Lizzy were all part of the soundscape in and around our home.
Talk about how you arrived at Ready, Steady, Die! as your band name. How does this name most suit your band’s sound and projects to date?
Sam K.: Morgan and I have both been in various bands over the decades and if anyone has ever been through the process of picking a band name, it can be a lengthy process. We decided to put no more than three names each onto the table. We both agreed on Ready, Steady, Die! People might think it’s a depressing name but it’s just honest. It says, we get revved up, do the best we can, make too many of the little things important and not enough of the important things important, and then we all end up the same way. And we like to make our music and lyrics as honest as the name.
What inspired your latest single, “Darkstar”? What is the song’s theme/storyline?
Morgan: It was a working title of a track I was working on, just this synth bass loop. Half our songs start with me cooking up a mood and Sam giving it voice, melody and lyrics and in this case, I think Sam wrote the perfect mystery thriller. I think it’s both enjoyable as a gothic fantasy but underneath lurks a very real issue.
Sam: And when he did hand the music over to me, the working title felt right. What might a dark star be in human terms? An infamous serial killer of course! As they say, it practically wrote itself.
What made Ready, Steady, Die! interested in using Midjourney to create the “Darkstar” music video? How did it work in putting the music video together and having the images suit the song?
Morgan: Of all the tools available to film makers, there isn’t a more direct way to visualize a story than Midjourney or Stable Diffusion because it literally accepts a text. It started as a fun diversion which became serious when we realized the images were not exactly accurate but fantastical, warped and literally gave us goosebumps. I’ve been making videos (the hard way) with CGI, 2D illustration and photography for years and it was fun (and also fucking scary) to let AI just come up with this stuff. It still takes a lot of tweaking and trial and error so it wasn’t an easy process. You still have to heavily curate and keep the artistic vision otherwise it’s a mess.
Does Ready, Steady, Die! have any other exciting projects on the horizon for their new and returning fans and followers to lookout for?
Morgan: We have one more single this year and it’s not from our album. There’ll be a video for that too which I’m working on using similar techniques. We’re 3 or 4 songs into a third album as well.
If you could speak directly to your audience members right now, what would you want them to know or recognize about Ready, Steady, Die!, your music, “Darkstar,” or anything else that we are yet to speak out here?
Morgan and Sam: We want to haunt your mind.
Follow Ready, Steady, Die!:
https://www.facebook.com/readysteadydieband