We checked in to ask a few questions to David Sandström, Refused drummer and recent Underground EZX collaborator!

Obviously, to the general public you’re known as the drummer of Refused, but you’re also a singer and a guitar player, you’re involved in several music projects, you’re a published author and more. Walk us through all the different sides to David that may be new to some!
I was a musical kid and played all kinds of genres growing up, I sang in a choir and taught myself guitar when I was 10 and I started playing drums when I was four or five and went to municipal music school for drumming. As i started forming bands, it was natural for me to be the drummer though I always wrote a lot of the guitar parts and lyrics as well. After Refused broke up, I made a bunch of solo records where i sang songs I’d written myself. Then I veered into more experimental stuff for some years and today, approaching 50, I basically do all of these things simultaneously. As I’m writing this, I’m on my way to Skopje to play at their jazz festival with this mostly improvisational orchestra of musicians from all over Europe. Oh, and a crime novel I wrote with my wife just came out in paperback in Sweden.

This EZX features your own kit, which was custom-made for the Refused reunion and designed to somewhat mimic the sound and energy of the drums on your “Shape of Punk to Come” record. Having played this kit for some 200-plus shows, what does it mean to you on a personal level and what did it mean for you to sample it?
This whole project was a lot of fun and the fulfillment of a wish or fantasy I’ve had for a long time, that a leading drum software company would put the same kind of energy into capturing more dirty, atypical drum sounds as they do recording an old sets from the fifties. Capturing my own set is part of that and it was very satisfying. I use these types of products mostly for demos and I’m never able to get the right vibe in the drums because most sampled drums are polished to the bone and often without much character, so you have to work with EQ and filters to get them anywhere near where you want them if you’re trying to get the right feel for a raw punk song or old school death metal or a post-punk track.

The other three kits, what’s the story behind them and what was It like playing and sampling them?
Magnificent. I like some of these kits more than my own. There are so many people making the type of music that me and Konie make and we honestly almost never talk drum software because there hasn’t been products for us, and going forward I think we’ll go back to these sounds over and over again. The really weird old kit sounds so damn cool, it’s as if it was made for a mid-eighties Tom Waits record. And then the Hellacopters and Viagra Boys kits does precisely what you’d expect of them: they boom and creak and smatter like rock ’n’ roll was supposed to.

Just like “Konie,” you have a fascination for music and sounds that are raw, gritty and not too pristine. What is it about “imperfection” that excites you musically?
Metal and punk/hardcore was my first love as a musician, and never the clean, technical type stuff. I was more drawn to the unhinged violence of Repulsion, Discharge and Neil Young & Crazy Horse than say, In Flames, Green Day or Coldplay. It’s not that these sounds are mistakes, they’re just made to create a certain atmosphere and there’s intention there. You want the drums to bring something with them besides a tempo and a rhythm, something primal and authentic. Perfection is a false god, the hunt for a sound without hiss or background noises is like the hunt for a perfect life. There’s no such thing, even the idea of it bores one to death. But the weird, unexpected combinations of sounds is, to me, the real life of music. The creak of the chair the guitar player is sitting on, the bass player’s cough leaking through the percussion mike. Just listen to “Exile on Main Street” or Charles Mingus’ recordings for Candid, early AC/DC or my personal favorite punk band Blitz, the unadulterated passion just exploding in the studio. That’s what I love about music, those moments captured, not clinically devoid of the noise of life, but brimming with it, sparkling with it, overflowing.

Listening back to the final product, what are your thoughts and how do you see yourself using the sounds in your own work?
I think “Konie” and you guys succeeded in capturing something really unique and I’m proud to have been a part of it. It is so cool that Toontrack wanted to make this and the result is everything we wanted it to be. I might actually start using these for records now and not just demos.