Merv Pepler of Eat Static was caught red handed being hard at work in the studio in Dorset. Here’s what he had to say for himself…

SB: Hi Merv, What are you up to right this second?
MP: I’m working in the studio with System 7 at the moment working on our System Static collaboration for the new system 7 album which is based on an old anime movie about a guy who has his head ripped off and replaced by a dogs head. So we’re dong a track called dog’s head at the moment. The daughter of the guy who drew all the old original stuff has got in touch and given us full use of all the graphics and stuff so it’s a pretty interesting project. Its going to be released with a load of graphics and stuff as well. I’ve almost finished the new Dendron album too which is something like psy-electro-funky-breaks. Looking forward to what people think of that when its out too.
SB: How about the Eat Static album?
MP: Yeah we’re just waiting for the release date on it. Its going to be a Spring release. Its called Dee-Classified. Its most likely going to be June or July though.
SB: Do you have anywhere online where we can hear it?
MP: Not just yet but we plan to have it up on our myspace pretty soon once we get the masters back. A few tasters will be up for sure.
SB: Have you got anything special planned for the Twisted Party?
MP: We always plan something special for those big gigs. We’ve got the brain back out now so we’ll have the giant brain back on stage. We actually played in London last week and had four guys dressed as American Military carrying me and Joey on in real body bags. We were dumped on the stage and then got out of the bags dressed as aliens! Probably something like that because the academy has got a nice big stage. You know because of the whole military conspiracy thing with the new album, we’ve gone back to the whole alien theme so its going to be nice to do something like that to mix in a bit. You know the last gig we started with world war two air raid sirens and stuff going off and the DJ before us, instead of fading him off we sort of ‘crunched’ him off the decks so it sounds like he’s been booted off! It works really well.
SB: So with Simon Posford playing Shpongle DJ before you we can expect something fun then?
MP: Yeah he’ll be well up for that. We’ll kidnap him or something!
SB: Tell us about the layout of your live set? What equipment do you use and what are you actually doing?
MP: Its me and Joey on stage still and basically we have a load of analogues on stage all being played live and then we’ve got a main hard disk recorder through which we’re playing the main tracks and alternative bits running in sync which we drop in and out of to jam a load of the tracks and we’ll also be showcasing a few things from the new album as a kind of preview. Tried a few of them out recently and they tore the place up. Really intense the new stuff!

SB: Sounds great! See you there. Thanks Merv

Catch Eat Static Live at the Twisted Live Party on the 25th May.