It is really interesting, we are learning about what life is like for people who don't have a lot of money and how they get around it. Whether they decide to become more antiestablishment or whether they enjoy the fantasy life of dancing and Ecstasy. Every one deals with it in different ways and that is good to see. It is also interesting to see that in the music business how the press is such a big deal and how people are made or destroyed by the papers.
It is one thing that we really wanted to impress upon people was that Luddite came out first and SMA is the further evolution of that. We are not exactly pleased that Luddite seems like a new thing. We feel that SMA is much more where we are headed and Luddite is an outgrowth of a live experience. We had played those songs live for a while and we just wanted to get in and record, record quickly and get that thing out. So we kept it pretty basic and the samples took a back seat. We are not totally pleased with that record. The track Brown is a new arrangement of an old song which was on our first album (which is very hard to find). It was actually recorded during the SMA sessions and if you have the CD version then it is a surprise track at the very end. It sounds totally out of place compared to anything else on Luddite.
The guitar is not really a main focus in Grotus, the bass, drums and samples are really the focus and of course the vocals. I am a guitar player originally and I guess I got tired of guitar bands and guitar music and there are certainly enough bands like Ministry and the Young Gods who are using guitars heavily so the samples take a back seat to that. We are very interested in creating music that is heavy and powerful like RnR with samples instead of guitars. The next album is going to be more drum oriented, more tribal . We also want to get into what people call Ambient music, I think we are going to try to mix that in with the drumming. It is not like we are going to make a techno record, but there is going to be a much more atmospheric and drum oriented sound. I am a big fan of the Orb and Aphex Twin.
A lot of it comes from a genuine love of the music and culture of India. I am the one in the band who listens to that more than the others but I listen to a lot of Middle Eastern music and Koali music from Pakistan and I have just tried to educate myself with as much international music as possible, because I am just so bored with popular music. That is where the original inspiration came from. Then we started doing a little more research and started discovering how interesting and colourful and evocative the artwork is as well and of course there is all kinds of religious and mythological history behind the artwork which led us to reading Bhagavad-gita and all kinds of Hindu texts and mythology.
We are not Krishna, but we find a lot of parallels with the Hindu religion and the theories and ideas that we have had. The idea of the Slow Motion Apocalypse is from the Bhagavad-gita which is centred around the end of the world, a subject which is on everybodys lips every few years. What is the year it is going to happen and so forth. Many people think that we will hit the year 2000 and everything will come to a complete dead stop or we will just blow each other up. Our idea is that that is not necessarily the way things are going to go. I guess the way that we look at it is that its a very slow moving thing - there is all kinds if destruction and collapse happening before our eyes without us noticing it. Hence on the cover your see lots of smiling, tranquil people while in the background is a horrible oil spill and ecological disasters, that is a sort of a play on that. Which is that the end of the world is happening before us and most of the time we don't know and we don't care - otherwise we would be trying to do something about it. I guess they call it entropy.
Consolidated was the first band that I ever saw who were using samples, media and television in a highly theatrical way. When they first started they did things in an extremely theatrical way since then they really changed their focus trying to be more like a Chumbawamba or something like that. They are trying to add a bit more humour into the mix now, but originally they were a major inspiriation to us - not politically necessarily. The way they communicated their political ideas is far different from the way we do but as far as their presentation and the fact that a live show can still be like theatre is to me what is missing with popular music these days. That is what was really great in the early punk days was that you would go and see a real show, sometimes if you went to see the Damned or Killing Joke you got a real performance.
That has completely disappeared from music with this whole grunge thing. The most popular thing now is to have a guy up there with a pair of shorts who you feel you could have a beer with later. I think Metallica were one of the first bands that made that kind of thing cool. It is good for heavy metal I suppose because there are so many people playing heavy metal who really don't care about the way they look or applying make-up and that sort of thing - so it was good in that respect because it came more down to the music and not just a bunch of bullshit. At the same time there is a sense of theatre missing- something theatrical doesn't have to be insincere is what I mean - it can still come from your heart and it can still communicate an honest, truthful idea.
Is a good place to be for a musician. There are not a lot of bands that sound alike everyone is really doing their own thing which is really good in itself. It is a good place to be because all the musicians get along and it's a very supportive community. I know everybody from Mr Bungle to FNM to Primus and they are all good people and very supportive. It is not like bands rise from the dirty water and leave San Francisco behind. With all the bands that have come out of there, San Francisco is a big reason why they exist. Even a band like 4 Non Blondes, but SF is a big part of them. It is kind of a city where you can kind of do what you want and nobody gets ostracised for looking like, sounding or believing in something that is different from everyone else. It is a very free city.
Jello is really big on bands that he likes live. He thinks if a band is really powerful live then he gets excited about signing them. He has been a fan for a while. At first he didn't like us because of some of the things that we had said in the press slagging rock music. He felt that we were saying that rock music was no good and that dance music was the way of the future which wasn't what we meant. We explained that we felt that rock was a little stale right now and that there are alternatives, other ways to make rock music that are fresh and not necessarily incorporating a guitar. So they came to see a lot of shows and really liked us. Our first record was on a little label in San Francisco - Spirit and we were trying to get our records more distributed and push things ahead. AT has a great reputation and they have been very good to us.
We have a lot of fans in SF. Our fanbase is getting stronger, we have toured the States three times. We have a very strange combination of fans . We get a lot of kids who are into punk rock who listen to hardcore and a lots what you would call "Crusties" or Travellers, people who are like that come to the shows because there is a lot of drums a lot of percussion in the live show and there is a very tribal atmosphere. Then there's a few people who are into Ministry and Nine inch Nails, but not so much any more, and a lot of people who are just big fans of experimental music of one kind or another . We toured with Mr Bungle and we ended up being exposed to a lot of kids who were kind of funk metal fans and we won over a few of those people as well. When we intitially were signed to AT the promotion at the club would say "Grotus on Alternative Tentacles" and that is all that people knew about it.They may have been fans of NomeansNo or Alice Donut so they would show up to see what we had to offer. I think they were really won over by the fact that although there were keyboards and synths, it could still be powerful and have a lot of that heavy sarcasm that other AT bands have and the power and energy that a lot of punk rock bands have.
Rhythmically and as far as the predominance of the bass, we feel like we are soul brothers of them in a way. We actually played with them a couple of times. When we first met them we didn't really like them too much as people - and we usually like everybody we meet in bands. Then we played with them in Chicago and it seemed like they had mellowed out, a bit more of a sense of humour then they had before.
If you listen to the SPK album Byzantine Flowers, you will hear some of the influence there. That was one of the first records that I ever heard where people were using electronics and ethnic
instruments together and that record sounds really fresh to me. I am not too keen on the TG stuff apart from some of the sounds they came up with. They were the first groups to say you can make really aggravating irritating music without guitars. In a way that is kind of fresh.
And of course you have
Einsturzende Neubauten and Test Dept who are just brilliant
That music sounds far more fresh to me than something like KMFDM. The whole Waxtrax sound died in the water, in States anyway - there are still people who like it but what happened was when the techno thing took over people started to realise that the the best thing about that music or music with machines was the actual sounds, samples and beats themselves and not necessarily the vocals and the songs. The songs are actually totally useless and forgettable in a way. You were talking about using technology for the sake of using technology so what the techno people said was; lets strip the personality away from the music, lets strip these songs and these vocals from the music because they really don't add anything and lets just take the core , the essential thing in the music that is interesting and expand on that. To me that makes a lot of sense. If you listen to a KMFDM you are going to hear the same song over and over again. I think NIN has potential, if they don't try completely to emulate Ministry, the guy is a really good songwriter and if he goes back to that and doesn't become a heavy metal band they could definately stretch the bounds of that Waxtrax sound and do something really cool. Like I said, the guy is really skilled at writing songs unlike Ministry or KMFDM (I don't know if you should print all this). I think that the heavy metal attitude has kind of ruined a lot of these people. Front 242 don't really know what to do with themselves now in the light of the success of bands like Ministry and in the light of the success of Techno. They are stuck somewhere in the middle.