I knew of the Elad Love Affair mainly because the singer Nola, worked with me at Delaware Camera. They were a young up and coming band in 2003 (when the interview was conducted) whose time was way too short here in Buffalo. Their members have gone on to form a variety of different projects including:
Cages - Nola
Novelist - Ryan
Teeth SO Sharp - Ryan & Bill
Enjoy this look into their past.The interview was conducted with Ryan Via Email back in 2003 i believe.
*Who’s in the band? What does each person play? What does each person do as far as work and school go?
Elad Love Affair is a five piece; Ryan, Bill, Nola, Mark Duggan, and Mark Ludwiczak. I am Ryan, I play guitar and deliver subs for money. I am going to school in Buffalo for Digital Media Arts. Bill also plays guitar and is currently unemployed. He is going to school in the New York City area for painting/visual arts. Nola sings and prints pictures for money. She will be going to school in NYC for photography in the fall. Mark Duggan plays bass, works the night shift at Home Depot and will be going to school in the NYC area this fall. Mark Ludwiczak plays the drums and works at a sports cards store. He is going to school at Penn State for journalism.
*How long have you guys been a band? I remember that Nola said you guys were called Ladies in Red and then she joined and you became Elad Love Affair.
Elad Love Affair has existed since January of 2000, so we have been a band for about two and a half years. Our first show was in May of 2000, and Bill joined the band in August of 2000. The band you mentioned, “Ladies In Red” didn’t really have that much to do with Elad Love Affair. Mark, Mark and myself had been playing together since we were kids, mostly just jamming and fooling around. It was nothing serious, but we called our little project “The Ladies In Red”. We never even played a real show or anything, just a few house parties and things like that… When we decided to get serious about our music we started over from scratch, it wasn’t like that band just changed their name.
*What’s the story behind the name Elad Love Affair?
Elad stands for electrical addict. It’s a term from a book called “The Terminal Man” where doctors plant electrodes in a man’s brain to prevent him from acting out on his violent impulses, afterwhich he begins to kill more and more because he is addicted to the electric shock he receives in his brain. So I came up with the term Elad Love Affair as sort of my take on the world today. It just seems to me that that, as a society, we would rather have our faces come from a screen or our voices come through a speaker. Human interaction is dying and we have been technologically sterilized.
*How did you guys get hooked up with Immigrant Sun? How are they treating you guys? How many records are you going to put out with them?
Immigrant Sun is awesome. We sent out about 75 copies of our EP last winter to every label we could think of and we heard back from 4-5. We had sent Immigrant Sun our last demo about a year earlier and they really liked the new songs. Pat, one of the two guys who runs Immigrant Sun, lived in Buffalo for a few years and they have a history of working with really great Buffalo hardcore bands, so maybe that helped us a bit. But those guys are awesome. We love them to death both as people and a label. They’ve done a ton of promotion for us and have worked so hard to get our name out there so we really couldn’t be happier right now. The contract we signed was for the initial EP and for two more full lengths after that so we are all really excited about the future.
*Who’s responsible for the lyrics and who’s responsible for the music?
Nola writes all the words and vocal parts and we all collaborate on the music. Usually Bill or myself will come up with a main idea for a song and then everyone else gets to put in their input to make a finished product. We really try and stop ourselves from bringing a completely composed song to the band and try and stress each member’s unique contribution to each song.
*You guys have some weird names for your songs. Word on the street is that you all are a little pretentious. What do you have to say about that?
I hear that, we probably are just an annoying bunch of faux art nerds. That’s true. But seriously, all of our titles are very double sided. On one end, there is a lot of thought that goes into the titles and we try to describe the overall feeling of the lyrics and music together, but also, all of our titles are very much tounge in cheek. When you create something like a song, which is a whole universe full of ideas and emotions, and then you reach the point where you have to give that huge thing a name, it’s like, “fuck you”. Titles are really just a formality and tradition that everyone follows and I will never understand how a band could ever represent all that a song is with one word, or with one line plucked from the chorus of the song, those song titles obviously are just filling in space. And then with all that in mind, if you look at the song naming trends in the hardcore scene, it’s sort of hard not to poke fun at it.
*I know some rumors are going around the scene about Nola because of her live performance, what do you say to people who think that Nola is a certain way because of the way she dances when she performs?
Most people don’t know this, but Nola actually put her self through college by dancing as a stripper. She’s really good at what she does. ha… but seriously I think that Nola is just a very passionate performer and she is really pure in what she does on stage. By that I mean, she honestly doesn’t give a damn what anyone in the audience thinks of her and she just does what feels good. She definitely makes a conscious effort to engage the audience through some of her antics, but as far as dancing is concerned, it’s just about the music making you feel good. I respect her for that.
*What topics do you write about in your lyrics? What are your songs about?
The majority of our music, both lyrically and musically is very dark. Nola’s lyrics are always very personal, but everyone in the band relates in their own way even though we haven’t had the experiences or thoughts that Nola has had. For me as a songwriter, music is a really vital and direct form of self-expression, so when I right a song or a guitar part, it tends to be an outlet for a lot of frustration and anger. I’m sure that, in the end, it means something different to everyone, but our music is always based around really strong feelings.
*Do you feel that the Buffalo scene has embraced you?
Yes. I think that for a band like Elad, who doesn’t fit nicely into any one scene and doesn’t appeal universally to any one group of people, we have been really well received. We have a relatively small following in Buffalo, but we’ve never encountered any negativity or closemindedness. It seems like, wherever we go, the handfull of people who like us really really like us and we are more than happy with that. We’ve gotten so much love from people in Buffalo and we are so gratefull to so many people for their support. I think our music is very ecclectic as far as combining different genres and crossing “scene” boundaries goes and as a result, we have managaged to reach at least a few people in all of the different subsects of the Buffalo hardcore scene which is really cool to see.
*I know you guys went on tour with Robot Has Werewolf Hand, how did you feel about that experience? How far did you go and do you have any crazy stories or problems?
Our tour with Robot Has Werewolf Hand, although technically only 3 shows, was amazing. We went up to Ann Arbor Michigan and came back through Ohio and Pennsylvania. It was also the first time that Elad had ever been that far away from home so it was definitely an experience. The people in Robot Has Werewolf Hand are all amazing and they were super fun to be around and we were really gratefull for them taking us under their wing or something… We stayed with a friend of Justin’s in Kent, Ohio after our show and eventually we settled into a 2-hour long acoustic hippie jam which then turned into a 2-hour long rendition of “Jump” by Van Halen. There was a keyboard and everything. One of the shows was at a place that doubled as an art studio/gallery and we searched through their garbage to find a gigantic paper mache head which was placed ontop of Robot’s Van. It was like 6 feet by 6 feet. That at least made a memorable picture.
*Where are you going on this current tour?
The first half of our tour makes a big loop through the North East, starting in New York, going through Boston, up to Burlington, and down through New Jersey. After that we meet up with a band from Johnstown, PA called Elementary Thought Process in West Virginia and head west as far as Chicago and as far north as Detroit. All of the details can be found at www.eladloveaffair.com.
*What do you ultimately hope to accomplish with this band? What do you hope to accomplish with music? Do you uever forsee music being a career path for any of you?
Personally, as a fan of music, I feel like there is a huge hole waiting to be filled in the music scene in general. There are so many bands doing the same carbon copy thing and the world is starving for something new. I can only hope that the music of Elad Love Affair will someday fill that hole for someone. That’s sort of what keeps us going. I think every artist’s dream is that they will be able to someday support themselves with only their art, and I would be lying if I said that that wasn’t my dream as well. However, within the realm of independent music it’s virtually impossible to achieve that status, so I guess music will always just be the driving force behind everything else in our lives.
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