Cobb: What was your impression of this evening?

Runkle: It's really tough to tell. We couldn't hear what the audience was hearing, and we were kind of rushed up on-stage. We heard there were sound issues. A lot of people gave the sound crew a really hard time, for not making our stuff louder. I think the general consensus was that it was their fault, not ours.

C: I was listening with the San Francisco-based Toy Department, which you've played with before.

Friede: What'd they say?

C: That it was good. They recognized all the songs from this set that you played tonight from the set you played with them.

R: That's cool.

C: What was the genesis of Ganymede like? How did you guys meet?

R: We're both from Pennsylvania actually. I'm from Lancaster and Dave is from Pittsburgh, and we both came out here to USC for undergrad film school. That's where we met.

F: It was back in 1995, in orientation. We had to stand up and introduce ourselves in front of the thirty-odd other students. And Patrick stood up and said that he liked film music, that was the only reason he was there, and was eager to seek out people with that interest. So I got up and introduced myself and the rest is history. We cultivated a similar interest in electronic music and we both really respected what the other was composing.

R: We really didn't officially form until 1997. And we were sending stuff back and forth. I was living in Philadelphia then. We really didn't have a studio to work in, just the MIDI keyboards that we played around with and came up with some of our first songs. "Communism" was the first song that we wrote and people seemed to like it; it has stayed in our set ever since.

C: Do you have any serious film influences?

R: Saying that we're big movie fans is an understatement. We don't want to come off as film geeks, but we're pretty deeply into movies.

F: People that share the same interest that we do will probably pick up on the subtle details that no one else in the world will. Throwing in influences from various film composers and film scores, the songs are directly inspired by movies we like. Some of which are very obscure.

C: Such as?

F: We have a song on Euromantique ["Love Games"] which is based on a 1979 Italian Star Wars rip-off, The Humanoid. Not many people have seen or heard of this movie, but we were so inspired by it that we wrote a song. People will read the song completely differently but...

R: Lyrically our songs work on many different levels. A song from our first album called "Clever Girl" is a line from Total Recall and one of the tracks on the Total Recall soundtrack. The song has nothing to do with the film score, but the lyrics are definitely inspired by the movie.

C: Do you guys have a favorite soundtrack?

R: Total Recall is probably it for me.

F: As far as orchestral scores, I'd have to say Conan the Barbarian. But we've grown up with electronic music, being inspired by electronic scores, probably the pinnacle example being Blade Runner.

R: If you listen to the lyrics to our songs, you'll see that they're pretty Blade Runner influenced. We're also influenced by those old synth pioneer European guys, which is why our new album is titled Euromantique. It’s kind of a tip of the hat to them; Giorgio Moroder, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Tangerine Dream, those kind of guys. We're not really interested in what I like to call "mindless dance fodder" so if we lose fans to that I'm sorry. We'd love to make the hardest dance record ever, but that's not the kind of music we make when we sit down to write.

C: Are you guys currently working on a new album?

F: We're working on an EP/maxi-single that follows the album as a promotional tie-in to the album with remixes from the songs, a couple of new tracks. That'll pretty much be the end of the Euromantique endeavor. We had released a single pretty early that we are 100 percent proud of and promoted pretty heavily. I don't think we can top it at the moment. Right now we're going to concentrate on remixing other artists, getting our name out there.

C: Do you have any remixes coming out soon?

R: We're going to have a remix on both of the Ninthwave Records compilation albums coming out.

C: Where do you see Ganymede in five years from now?

R: What is this, a job interview? [laughs] I think we're going to put out an album by 2003, maybe sooner. We want to take at least a year and a half to do our next album. Our first album, After the Fall, came out about a year ago. The reason we have another one coming out so soon is not because we rushed this one through, but because the last one took forever to get out. It was done way before that and we sat on it for awhile. We actually spent a year and a half on this one. We want to do something a little different. The songs we have now are pop songs. With this next album, we might branch out and take the songs in another direction; we haven't really talked about it yet.

F: Five years, it really depends on the state of the scene. We're not outside of it but I'm sure you'll make clear that synthpop is not the in music at the moment, but it could be at any time. We're really loyal to the scene.

C: What's in your CD player right now?

R: Oh jeez, I listened to the new Depeche Mode album on the way down here. But I thought it was terrible. I've also been listening to the re-release of the soundtrack to Twilight Zone: The Movie on CD, it has a great eighties pop song on it called "Nights Are Forever."

F: As for me I'm always buying the very latest synthpop. I try to stay right on top of it. What I listened to last night was the new album by Soviet, We Are Eyes, We Are Builders. It's only been out for two days. You can't get any newer than that. So for anyone that doubts it, we definitely are big supporters of the modern synthpop scene.