Carpe Noctem Interviews, Vol 3

by Carnell, Thom

  The work I’ve seen that you’ve done on her is amazing.

  Thank you.

  It’s just so beautiful. I recall seeing a piece at Wondercon in Oakland, California that they had displayed of a full frontal of her.

  Oh, yeah, the portrait shot. That’s one of my favorite pieces.

  Oh man, I was walking along and I hadn’t even heard that you were going to be there and I looked over and saw it and it stopped me in my tracks.

  Oh, thank you.

  Just beautiful.

  It was one of those pieces that was very nerve-wracking because it was something different for me. I had never done anything like that but I knew what I wanted it to look like. That fear of a blank canvas got hold of me. I had the piece penciled up on the board and it sat in my studio for four months while I worked on other stuff. Finally they called me and said they needed the painting. I couldn’t bring myself to start it because I was very apprehensive about it. That very seldom happens where I psyche myself out of the job and I really intimidated myself with it. When I finally got down to it, start to finish, the piece (it took about four days) really worked out. I wouldn’t change a thing about it.

  Finally, now that you’re doing some stuff for Harris and that’s going well, what’s in the future? What more does Joe Jusko want to do?

  I really don’t know. If you would have asked me a year ago if I’d be doing a fully painted book, I couldn’t have predicted this. Something else always comes up. One of the great things about being in the business for a long time and having as many contacts as I have is that you are always being offered new and different work. People know, for the most part that I’m working on this now, so they’re not calling me, but as soon as I put feelers out, I’m sure I’ll get offers for other stuff. I would love to be able to take a year off and just do some work for myself. I haven’t done a personal painting in ten or fifteen years. I’d love to do some wild life art. I’m planning a photo safari to Africa sometime in the next couple of years, hopefully. I would love to just take some time and spend a month on a painting, a nice large, detailed painting. I can’t remember the last time I spent a week on a painting, much less a month. I’d love to do some wild life lithographs and stuff like that. I guess if I could pick the one thing I would want to do, at this point, it would be to do some serious wild life art, just take some time and really do it.

  Klay Scott

  A Phoenix Rising from a Circle of Dust

  “Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out by only few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.”

  - Claude Levi-Strauss

  The second but equal half of the Angeldust project is musician Klay Scott. The self trained Scott first burst into the public eye as a result of his band, Circle of Dust, and then, later, with the Argyle Park project. Both Circle of Dust and Argyle Park, having been released on the now defunct independent music label Rex, served to often times pigeon-hole this talented gentleman as an ‘alternative’ artist, even though Scott’s repertoire is made up of hard driving, utterly engaging, industrial based music. The music on the Circle of Dust releases was possessed with one thing that is usually lacking in the entertainment industry - a conscience. Then, illusionist/song writer/vocalist Criss Angel stepped into the picture and the Angeldust project was born. Scott, working like some possessed orchestral conductor, is responsible for keeping the music end of things together while Angel amazes audiences with his legerdemain and vocal prowess. One intriguing aspect of Scott’s side of the Angeldust performance is his utilization of self designed, custom made instruments created from scrap metal which further serves to give an otherworldly aspect to what is already a post apocalyptic vision. These illustrious gentlemen now sit poised to storm the battlements of the entertainment industry with a formidable one-two-punch the likes of which audiences the world over have never seen.

  ~*~

  Can you give me some background on your musical training, the bands you’ve been a part of, and the projects that you’ve masterminded?

  I guess that would be kind of extensive at this point, but there’s a few that are worthy of mention. As far as training is concerned, I’ve never really had any official training. The only training I’ve ever had was my own kind, which consisted of picking up an instrument I wanted to play, and then trying to figure it out. I would watch and learn from anyone I could, and then just spend hours practicing and discovering. My technological training, such as sampling, programming etc. was essentially me with my head buried in a manual, making mistakes and figuring out the solutions myself. Projects... The most prominent and prolific, for me, has been Circle of Dust which has taken seven or eight years of my life. That was my main creative outlet. I’ve also produced bands like Chatterbox and Klank and worked with Prong, including a song they did for The Misfits Tribute Album, Violent World. I’ve written various pieces for MTV over the years, including the opening theme to MTV Sports. Of course, I’ve also been guilty of doing numerous side projects using pseudonyms, like Argyle Park for instance.

  I know you do a lot of producing and I’m wondering which do you find more satisfying: the role of musician/writer or producer.

  I would have to say that it depends on the mood I wake up in. I don’t think I would be happy doing one or the other. I’ve found that, as far as my personality is concerned, and I think I can speak for both Criss and I, is that we’re never happy doing one thing, and that is the beauty of our relationship. We’re always seeking bigger and better. So, I don’t think producing is better than playing, programming, or performing. Variety, as it is said, is the spice of life and that’s the beauty of it. I wouldn’t pick one over the other.

  The majority of the music I’ve heard from you has been very energetic, guitar oriented industrial, have you ever considered releasing or have you ever released a more ambient or softer sounding work?

  For a combination of both of those, you can pick up what will be the final Circle of Dust record, Disengage, which will out March 10th and distributed through Polygram. There are 3 or 4 ‘ambient’ tracks on the release, in addition to the rest of the new material. The release overall is certainly different, more developed if you will, than the stuff I was doing 5 or 6 years ago. I love the aggression of the guitar and the movement of the electronics in the music I create, but there is something about the simplicity of just a guitar and a vocal, or a synth pad, that evokes a deeper emotion that cannot be obtained through big sounding drums and aggressive guitars and synths.

  All the multi-layered stuff?

  Right. As far as the way I have been creatively, as far as my releases have been concerned, they have been predominately driven with the heavier type guitar and the more aggressive synth stuff... but development and change are essential to creativity. That was the stuff I wanted to create at that time, although musically I was listening mostly to things other than the style of music I was creating.Over time however, both development and change dictated that I expand the material I was writing. In fact, in 1995 I had recorded a version of my song “Onenemy” which is from the self titled Circle of Dust release, that consisted of just my vocals and a few acoustic guitars. The label never did release it, but the concept for me was not a new one. I merely had laid aside the more organic instruments and traditional sounds for a time in place of more synthetic and uncommon sounds.

  You might be lynched if you came out with just an acoustic guitar...

  Yeah. As I’ve said before, it all points back to getting bored or not being satisfied doing one thing. You will definitely see that in the future as far as performances go. An Angeldust show will entail more than just the stuff you’ll hear on our full length CD perhaps. You will hear just ethereal pieces and some acoustic guitar pieces.

  I’d like you to comment on something I rece
ntly read on the Internet. “Industrial music is to the nineties what New Age music was to the eighties. Everyone seems to be doing it, and everyone is doing it poorly.”

  That is pretty damn true. I fully agree, and I’m not saying this to offend anybody, but this is not really anything new to people who listen to industrial. The equipment is affordable, especially now in America they’re pushing this whole electronica thing, so everybody and their grandmother is going out, buying a sequencer, and, all of a sudden, they’re a musician. I don’t see it that way. I think there is more to that than just your programming skills. You need to write a good song, that’s the basis of it. When I first had gotten into ‘industrial’ music in the later eighties which is when I was first introduced to it, that was when it was exciting because it was not so prolific, it was much more underground. There was nothing like that preceding it, so it totally filled a musical gap. It was all about the energy. It was all about the vibe. The ‘industrial’ style of music was mostly driven more by angst than anything else, but it has become a caricature of itself with people just going out and buying a drum machine and throwing a guitar loop over it for six minutes.

  Overdriving their vocals...

  Right! The typical distorted vocals have really become passé. I really don’t consider what I do to be ‘industrial.’ It’s been lumped in with that and, so be it, that’s fine. I love sound. I love the sonics. I love relying on more than just a guitar to create your tracks. Think of what you hear in a day, even going down to traffic noise and things like that, subtleties. So, why be limited to just your standard instruments. There’s a whole musical palette, so to speak, that you can choose from. Unfortunately, you get lumped into this industrial category and then people think you are talentless and you can’t write a song.

  We get a lot of industrial music at Carpe Noctem sent to us and I’ve now had to become real selective because a lot of things sound the same. You can put five discs on random and it’s impossible to tell them apart. I mean there are a couple of bands out there that I, personally, think are really good. Mentallo & the Fixer being one of them.

  Diatribe, I think, is very good.

  There is other stuff out there which is good. Now and again, Metropolis is doing something of interest with Forma Tadre. Reconstriction has Collide. Some of the stuff coming out of Europe is pretty cool. But, by and large, man, it’s making music by ‘cookie cutter.’

  In a sense, I feel that, in my career, I’m past that stage. I really don’t get tangled up in those arguments anymore because I was in that phase five, six, seven years ago. I already went through that and that was just a part of growth and what I needed to do back then. I really feel that we are approaching the new millennium and there’s still people writing stuff that could have been off of Bites or Remission from Skinny Puppy back in the eighties. It’s time to change, you know? Break out of your confines. You’re not restricted musically. Don’t listen to a band and then copy what they’re doing. Be original.

  I think it’s that way with the whole music industry in general. I was saying to someone recently, “What happens when the ‘alternative’ has become the ‘mainstream’?” I mean, ‘Top Forty’ of today is still packaged as ‘alternative,’ and it’s still supposed to be cutting edge and supposed to be where the music industry is heading, but, if you listen to it, it’s stuff we were hearing five years ago when no one gave a shit.

  I can only speak from the limited amount of music I browse on the commercial radio stations around here, which I do not listen to and probably never will, but they’re still trying to revive Pearl Jam. As far as I’m concerned Pearl Jam died five years ago. That wave has crashed and is gone. Now, they’re looking for electronica or they’re looking for ska or they’re looking for the next big thing. The bands that are going to transcend this categorization are bands that are writing good songs and it doesn’t matter what their style is, it’s a song that people are going to go and buy the CD because they liked the song.

  Do you think that the increased usage of computers and samplers has stolen the ‘human’ aspect of music making?

  It depends on how you look at it. Giving you a little personal history, part of what drew me to this style of music and computerized music to begin with was the machine factor, the mechanical factor. I mean, there’s something beautiful about that, the technology. If you don’t keep up with technology, it’s going to swallow you alive and you will become a part of the majority that is left behind because they don’t understand what’s going on technologically. The people who hold technology in their hand are going to be the ones who rule the future, so to speak. I think that you can use technology for your purposes, which would keep it human, or you can be controlled by it and it makes you a machine. So, it really depends on the individual and their usage of the machine. As far as whether or not a song contains a programmed drum beat or a live drummer, I don’t think it’s even an issue any more. You can program a drum beat to sound like a live drummer or you can or you can make a live drummer sound a lot less human. It’s irrelevant. It’s more how you control the technology. Are you going to control it or is it going to control you.

  In the film world, when Terminator 2 came out and we all first saw ‘morphing’ and then, suddenly, you were seeing morphing everywhere. Do you think people have to go through that ‘play with the toys and overuse them, and then, when sanity returns, they can then use them more effectively’?

  I fully believe that. I think it’s a cycle. I have a feeling that a lot of the things being invented right now, that’s exactly how it will be. People are going to over use the technology. You’re excited about it, of course. But then, when you see it show up in two hundred movies or there’s a myriad of bands releasing CDs that all sound the same because it’s the next big thing. For instance, MTV, to pick a scapegoat here. Before MTV was created, the only way you really knew about a band was listening to them on the radio or magazines. Now, we’re looking at bands today that have relatively short life expectancies. They are pushed so hardcore on MTV that, after six or nine months, you don’t ever want to hear their name again because they are just everywhere you look. I don’t know if there will ever be a balance that way as far as television is concerned, but I think just technology in general, people are going to take it, abuse the hell out of it, and then, there will eventually come a point where people will settle back and start to use it in moderation.

  Do you ever worry that since the Angeldust project is so visual and can easily become a media ‘commodity,’ and, therefore, can be consumed by the ‘consumer,’ and then, six months down the road those same consumers could potentially say, “Ok… where’s that next big thing?”

  Well, I’ll tell you why we don’t worry about that. There is so much involved with this project. The visuals, yes, are very important, but this project transcends being limited by the visuals. It transcends being limited by just releasing a CD and touring clubs. If it gets to a point where the visuals are out of control, and maybe it does get to that point on MTV or whatever media form, and the visuals are overly emphasized, we very simply can pull back and go do a club tour and stay out of the media for a while. We can go and do a soundtrack for the whole show, which is another one of our future plans. We’ll have full length releases with songs as any other ‘band’ would have in addition to ‘theatrical’ releases, which would contain the instrumental pieces in our show. I’m certain at some point in the future, we’re going to get involved with movies and things of that sort. We don’t look at this like, “This is what we do and that’s it.” We’re looking at this like this is what the project is about and there are a million facets to it.

  ...tip of the iceberg.

  Yeah, we are confident that the possibilities are endless.

  One of the things I mentioned to Criss earlier was that the whole Cirque du Soleil phenomenon where they have this touring company, but now you’re seeing soundtrack CDs and all this stuff. Their fingers seem to be in a lot of different pots.
With Angeldust, I see that potential increased exponentially because you guys have, virtually, the whole board covered.

  For us, that is the beauty of the whole thing. When Criss and I first met, probably going back three or four years ago, we clicked immediately on a personal level and on a professional level and that is why we’ve spent years developing ideas and concepts. So, we don’t even know what is going to be possible, but we have very big ideas and, hopefully, we’ll have a chance to live them out.

  How did you hook up with Criss and what made you decide that Angeldust was where you wanted to put the bulk of your energies?