Dynonisis are a four piece band from Sheffield, England. Describing their style as "Ethereal Rock" they draw their sound from a number of separate influences to form an end product of a self produced album and an EP which have received numerous favourable reviews.

MySpace : www.myspace.com/dyonisis
Website : http://dyonisis.info/home.htm

(Q)Who are Dyonisis and how did each member of the band become involved?

Dyonisis are Nel Cave (vox), Tom Chaffer (guitars, beats), Lou Welsby (vocals, piano) & Marcus Cave (bass).

In 2000 Tom needed somewhere to put his musical ideas and wanted to form a band. I loved singing but was too introverted to do so in front of people. Alcohol being the great leveller it is, I was singing in his kitchen one evening thinking no one could hear and he must have liked something about my voice as he asked if I'd like to mess around with putting things over his demos, the first result of this being "winter" off the first album.

Over the next few years more songs were written and I got into the idea of performing. We needed a live bassist and Marcus was both a bassist and my fiancee. He'd just left his old band and needed an outlet so it all slotted together. Having a married couple in the band can sometimes add to the fire but fortunately he's perfect!

We had a couple of different female 2nd vocalists but internal and external pressures made it hard to find someone we could all settle with. Lou was a friend we knew through the local rock club (Corporation) and was immediately interesting as a singer because he has such a unique singing style. Since she joined the band we became a unit and completes the sound in ways we never thought possible. I love writing with her voice in mind.

(Q)What are the origins of the name?

It's a feminised spelling of Dionysus. The Greek incarnation of Bacchus. I played Dionysus in a school play and the concepts underlying the deity, including an inversion of gender roles, interest me enough to want to name a band after. Greek theatre evolved from Dionysian rituals and to return to the name for a performance feels apt.

(Q)There are bands such as Lacuna Coil and Abigail's Mercy who have combined male and female vocalists to form quite an impressive sound. Reviewers of Dyonisis also say the same about your two female lead vocalist arrangement, one of whom stated "Nel Cave and Lou Welsby blend together to create an ethereal and almost folksy sound". What do you personally feel makes this arrangement work so well?

One of my musical "ticks" is more than one voice singing together. I think being female myself means that female voices resonate with me more immediately on an emotional level. I sometimes hear voices singing together in my head and the band gives me an opportunity to make them real.

Most people feel more than one strand thought/expereince when emotionally affected. Having two melody lines gives an opportunity to recreate that with sound. Hopefully it communicates to the listener a more accurate emotion.

(Q)Having read the lyrics of some of the songs of Dyonisis it seemed a common theme throughout was degrees of emotion, what are your thoughts on this?

I had a rather debilitating breakdown many years ago & some of the songs are echoes of me sorting these things out. My entire life I've felt that who i am emotionally has been a destructive force and being in a band has been the first outlet where it can be genuinely viewed as constructive. It's great to have somewhere positive to put all that stuff.

(Q)A main problem, for want for a better phrase, for reviewers of
Dyonisis seems to be how to categorise you as they make mention of a number of different bands and genres when making comparisons. Do you think it is a good thing that Dyonisis has proven to be so hard to define?

I'm flattered by it. It might hinder us when trying to look for people who might like our sound but it's great to feel like the combination of these 4 people musically produces something fresh. It probably helps that we are all into differing genres and bands to each other and there is some much musical diversity in Sheffield that we get to watch and play with many diffeent bands and styles. There's so much parroting of insular genres in music and i think having influences from diffuse places is liberating. It's one of the biggest compliments to be made to a band to sound like no one else and to be told you define your own sound.

(Q)Dyonisis are currently in the process of writing a new album, how is this progressing and what can people expect?

I'm listening to a demo me and Tom have been passing between us for the last few days right now! I think the last album was the sound of us learning what we sounded like. This album is being written having prior knowledge of what all 4 members sound like and what our strengths and weaknesses are. It's no longer just me & Tom throwing things at each other and seeing what sticks! Although there's still a lot of that...

We're about 75% of the way through writing it. There's trip~hop and folk influences threaded through it aswell as the rockier moments. I personally think the writing is miles stronger as i've relaxed into the idea of writing songs. I came from a completely inexperienced position and it took a while to feel comfortable expressing myself in this way.

We've finally started consolidating our ideas regards production techniques. One of the joys of being independent is freedom to record as we please, but the drawback is that we've had to learn from scratch how to do these things!

(Q)If you had the chance to ask anyone in the world a single question,
who would the person be and what would be the question?

What a question! I don't think i could do it justice! I'd cop out and just ask "are you finishing that beer or is it mine now?!"

(Q)In your band profile it lists Louisa Welsby as possessing skills on the
piano, will this be something to be heard in the future?

Some tracks have been written with the piano being a lead instrument and jamming with Lou on piano has been the catalyst for some key songs. It features on our Ltd Ed ep, How much of an appearance it'll make on the next album is something even we don't know yet. We'll start recording and see what happens.

(Q)You recently collaborated with Strongarm Media for the filming of
"Hunter" in the Peak District, what can you tell us about this and do Dyonisis have any plans for any further ventures of this nature?

True to the law of the sod the heavens opened and we spent 12hrs being very cold and wet in our stage clothes!

Things we learnt:

* If there's a weather god she has a peverse sense of humour.
* Onions from Netto are crap.
* Trying to fog up the great outdoors with the world's smallest smoke machine doesnt work.
* Petrol and fire have a very tenacious grip on each other once they get going.
* After struggling to get a generator over a rocky stream, only then will you realise that there is a very accessible carpark on the other side.
* We have the hand to eye co-ordination of a bunch of drunken three year olds.
* When wandering up to your significant other to repeatedly headbut them repeating the mantra "coffeecoffeecoffeecoffee..." Check that the man they are talking to is not the park ranger, checking that you are behaving responsibly in his bit of national park.
* I have the world's campest umbrella.
* Adders live in the Peak District.
* Lou takes 6 hours to put on eyeshadow.
* My skirts can hold three times her body weight in water and brambles.
* The above will not leave me very cheerful, in fact the phrase "sense of humour bypass" springs to mind.
* Tom has all the health and safety instincts of a depressed lemming.
* If you want to visit a pub in the peaks be prepared to take out a mortgage.
* It might look like a stepping stone... But it's lying.
*We'd love to do it all again if we had the opportunity!

(Q)Where do you hope Dyonisis will be five years from now?

My deepest hope is for the band to still be going. It's such an important part of my life that i'd be utterly lost without it.

(Q)Who would you currently regard as being your favourite singer / band
and why?

Skin and Skunk Anansie. It's the band that has had the biggest impact upon me growing up and some of the vocal dexterity she achieves on all 3 albums blows me sideways. My favourite current band changes all the time, one of the best live gigs I've been to recently though was to see 65daysofstatic. Marcus likes New Model Army and Sage Francis. Tom loves The Cure and Lou is into cinematic filmscore music.

(Q)Thank you for your time, is there anything else you would like to say?

Thanks for talking to us! Only thing I can think of to say is however dark things get it feels that way because there's so much light elsewhere in the world. Just because you're not stood in it right now doesn't mean it can't shine on you and never will.