Dennis Lyxzen - Dinner with the king of punk-hardcore

"Tomorrow we leave for Australia, we're playing Big Day Out, and one night we're even opening for Iggy & The Stooges. Iggy Pop is my father's age, except he stage-dives every night and is always shirtless: wow!" Dennis Lyxzen, 20 years of punk and veganism under his belt, tears into his vegetable-stuffed pizza like a kid in front of a new toy. Beside him, Mr. Bloody Beetroots, Bob Rifo, joins him in talking about the brand-new project taking them around the world, Church Of Noise (named after a Therapy? track).

When Bob first got in touch and asked me to sing on a track, I was really quite skeptical. It was only by meeting him, talking to him, arguing with him that I realized I was dealing with someone who, like me, had grown up marked indelibly by punk, and above all rooted in a strong political outlook. That's when I thought we could really make something happen.

1998. With "The Shape Of Punk To Come", the story of one of the decade's most important and innovative bands, Sweden's Refused, comes to a close. Dennis Lyxzen was its voice, its screams, its words and its soul. Punk and hardcore fused together in an unprecedented, explosive mix. A genre is born, along with a scene that's crowded and revered by fans worldwide. Dennis and the band ride it gloriously for almost ten years. "We were furious, which was the perfect mood for those years. It's cool because you're creating something new, and you can feel it. But then you realize the scene around you is closed off and starts to feel too small. That's why, when Refused broke up, I tried right away to offer something completely different, to do something else."

Dennis's radical political ideas were thus channeled into a more easy-listening project, less furious and closer to 70s sounds. "The First Conspiracy", the debut album by (International) Noise Conspiracy, came out in 1999: "It's certainly the experience closest to what I'm doing now with Bob. The same attempt, the same challenge of bringing politics onto the stage and getting people to dance. (I)NC was indeed an easier shift in sound, but the lyrics carried the same force. A kind of positive violence, an act of protest that was first and foremost joyful." A small masterpiece by the band, "A New Morning, A Changing Weather", from 2001: "It's the album that best represents us. Sound, music, words: on that record everything moves in the same direction. But the experiences of the following two albums ('Armed Love' and 'The Cross Of My Calling', ed.), made in the studio with the greatest producer of all time, Rick Rubin, were just as thrilling. Rick's a cool guy, a laid-back type who still has a huge appetite for experimenting."

And then, amid other projects (punk outfit AC4 and new wave act Invasionen), comes the call from Bob Rifo. The two of them smile, thrilled and excited: Church Of Noise is an ambitious creature and expectations are high, it has the feel of a genuine gamble, a real challenge. "Church Of Noise wants to be a crossover project between dance and punk," says Bob, "pushing things even further than Bloody Beetroots. Destruction and anarchy in the name of a true ritual. It's a Church in the literal sense of a gathering place, a sacred one: the dancefloor transcended into a much stronger, essentially political concept." Dennis, who knows the snooty, know-it-all indie world all too well, found himself for the first time singing in front of a rave crowd: "And it's a crowd with a much more open mind than I expected, ready to soak up and live through whatever's offered to them on stage. For me it's a new thing, getting on stage and not knowing what people will take away from what you do: some will just want to dance, some will punch the air in excitement, some will look for the spectacle of lights and masks. That's fine, and it makes for an environment that's freer and more creative because of it, with no limits."

Music without limits or boundaries: a genuine Church spread across the whole world, with its own events and its own ministers. Bob again: "Church Of Noise will first of all be a song, which we'll be presenting at Coachella (one of the world's biggest rock festivals, in Indio, California) this spring. Then certainly an album, coming out soon. Necessarily shorter than Romborama, because we're after more punch and tighter cohesion. I actually wanted Dennis to write all the lyrics, regardless of whether he's the one actually singing them, because the message we want to communicate is a single one, and he has the means to express it perfectly. And then we're genuinely thinking about something spread across the whole world, but we can't talk about that yet. It's an idea with very high ambitions, we'll see."

The power of an idea. Today, in 2011, after being beaten up, trampled on, thrown down the toilet and flushed away, ideas remain the substance, the truth, the very reason for making music. Bob and Dennis - dance and punk, electronics and analog rage - come together through the strength of an idea: "I'm getting into the world of electronic music for the message I want to communicate together with Bob, because music reaches the masses and still leaves them free to speak their mind. Do I believe music can still change things? It changed me, it changed Bob, it's changed the lives of countless people around the world. Of course it changes things!"

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