'This time of year the record industry slows down and stops basically.
After Thanksgiving there's noting really going on, but this project is.
He just recorded a live record with Megadeth and they want to go
back to their very very very first record. Recorded in '84 I think
called 'Killing is my Business, and Business is Good'. They found the
original tapes, they had to bake them to get the stuff of them. And they transfered everything to Pro Tools, and Dave wan't to rerelease the
record like a first album 2002 version. So my job is to, like now the
band plays to a click track, everythings locked. In these days these
guys were a bunch of, I mean you've seen it on behind the music, their
drug addled fuck ups. Total heavy metal kids. My job is to figure out
what tempos they were attempting to play then chop everything tight to
that and tighten up everyone's performances so it's a little more steady
then go and layer in some samples to give the drums a little more
fidelity. Then Bill is going to reamp all the guitars and do hypermix's
of them... like modern sounding mixes.
Well tell me about you a
little bit. Breif history.
'I'm
from Eerie, Pennslyvania. Been playing drums since I was six. I had a
natural inclination to tap on things and march in time to parades and
marching bands. My dad noticed that and got a jazz instructor to try me
at age six at lessons with the proviso that thats so young that he was
like i'll just let you, and my dad was like 'That's cool.' And it worked
out okay, and I grew up my whole life playing anything that I could play
drum live, I was in drum core, marching band, the city philharmonic, I
was the pit drummer in Eerie's musical theatre for a couple of years in
high school, played in a punk band in high school. I did everything you
could possibly do to try to play until around my early years in high
school I got into New Wave and New Wave kind of got into electronic. And
I was like, well this is even cooler 'cause they look wierd and can play
other sounds than just drums. I took my summer job and bought my first
Simmons kit, and I've been down the electronic path ever since. But
allways with the drum slant.'
How did you end up
hooking up with Trent Reznor?
' I'm from
Eerie, he's from Mercer which is an hour south of me. I was playing in a
band called 'Measle' which was an electronic band halfway between Eerie
and Mercer, and I allready owned an 808 and an Oberheim machine and two
different simmons kits and I wanted to buy another drum machine and my
keyboard player said he knew somebody in Mercer who was selling a lind drum. So we went to Mercer and bought his
lind drum off of him. So I
bought his drum machine, and then a couple of years later he was allready living in Cleaveland playing in a local band there, I ended up
going to Kent State University which is outside of Cleaveland. The
drummer in their electronic band quit and he remembered me and got a
hold of me. I went up to Cleavland and ended up joining that band and
that kind of began our working relationship. And from that point, that's
that.
The
night I joined the band in Cleaveland with Trent. You know, we played
some stuff and had a conference and they were like, 'Yeah, you got the
gig. Let's go get some dinner and there's this weird band playing
tonight called Skinny Puppy.' We went and saw the show and I had no
idea, I was like, "What in the fuck?". You know how they always do the
fake Ogre death at the end? Well back in those days, this was still the
best one I've ever seen. They had a kid planted wearing like a
fraternity sweatshirt, and a painters cap flipped backwards which was
typical for where this club was in Cleaveland, and during the last song
this jarhead kid gets up on stage. We were like, "Whoa, why is this kid
here tonight anyway?" He was carrying his beer bottle and you could tell
he was just drunk and beligerent, Ogre was like "Get off the stage" but
still trying to keep singing, and the kid like smashed the beer bottle
in Ogre's face. Ogre hit the floor bleeding. Security runs out grab the
kid and drag him off stage. Kevin and Duwane finish the song then just
kind of walk off the stage. And I was like why did they even finish the
song. The kid was a total plant.
I wish I
was at the show in Toronto though. The had somebody planted in the crowd
who like got up on people's shoulders in the crowd with a rifle and shot
Ogre from the crowd. Blood goes off on Ogre, the crowd goes off, they
didn't know and they beat the shit out of the guy with the gun."
How did you end up
working with David Sylvian?
'
Complete cold call, he's one of my heros. My manager was like, who would
you ever want to work with and I was like 'Sylvian'. I tell the story of
when CD's were invented and i finally had the money to convert my vinyl.
The first CD's I ever bought was Japan CD's, because my Japan albums
were crappy and I wore those out. So we just called him up, and he's
never done much collaborative work outside of his circle. He asked us to
send him music, and we did, and he said yes. Japan played a really
influential part of my formative musical years I'm sure, and I'm really
honored. '
How was working on the
Alice CD?
'
Well, I met American when working on the Quake soundtrack and he called
me up on this and I went up to EA and to view the storyboards.. We just
thought we'd try it. It worked out great, it was just a really long
process. It was difficult because even though it's really Goth, and
creepy, and Burtonesque, and whatever, it does try to hold true to the
time periods of the book, and the characters of the book, so it doesn't
just make up shit for no reason. So you know, he wanted the soundtrack
to be creepy and wierd and sound bizarre, but it had to sound bizarre
from like 1890. So that basicaly meant that every piece of gear that I
owned was useless. I couldn't use synthesizers, drum machines, drums,
guitars. I was trying to run things through effects, but everytime I
started running through flangers and chorusing and stuff it sounded too
'60's. And so we had to define a pallete of sounds we could use. It was
challenging for that reason, but really cool. I really bummed that EA
didn't carry the project through, it was supposed to go to Playstation 2
before Halloween just a few weeks ago. But they pulled it. The
soundtrack was supposed to correspond with the release of the game. But
I still think it's a cool piece of music, it's a great Halloween record
for industrial goths out there. It's cool, cause it's kind of abient too
so you can run it in the background of some parties and stuff. '
'
I'm putting my live show together and begin touring early next year. My
goal, for as much as possible, the rule is to have no 'start' button on
stage. It's me and two friends, a guitar player who plays keyboards and
a bass player who plays keyboards. I will be playing drums and any other
backing music will be triggered off of my drumset. In various bizarre
and interesting ways. Because I really want to make it feel live not
just like you hit start on the DAT and everybody just plays what they
can play type of thing. I really really don't want that. Especially the
instrumentals, I want to be able to kind of do them in an improv
fashion, I don't mean to sound all jazz geeky, but reinterperet some of
the rebirth loops and things on live bass. And I'll be triggering loops
and chunks of things that I can mix and match them as we go, and change
it up every night. I really want people to be able to come see this
music. I am so sick of DJ culture, it just really bums me out that
people come to see a 'concert' and it's just some guy with a coffin,
smoking a cigarette and a bunch of intellabeams. It's like, this is a
show? What am I watching you do? If you wanna pay me 30$ and come over
to my house I'll play you all of my favourite songs too. You know,
that's bullshit to me.
So I'm
getting away from that as much as possible, but with the vocals it's the
hardest because there's a few people on the album. So I'll be running
them prerecorded, but changing it up some 'cause otherwise it would just
be wierd. I want the original performances, so I'm working out ways to
work that in also. '
