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Flesh Eating Foundation

Zero: Flesh Eating Foundation has always had a core of two people, me and The Juddaman. At times we have been a three-piece, as we are now, or four-piece, but from the beginning there was always the core of two. The beginning was some time during the early 1990s. We two have been friends since pre-school. We've also always shared common musical ground, and at some point that evolved into having fun messing around with cheap and broken instruments. This mucking around became something that you'd recognise as the Flesh Eating Foundation during the late 1990s. We have stumbled and staggered through various lineups ever since and are likely to stagger on for some time to come.

You've released a ton of demos and EPs over the past decade or so. What have you learned in the process, and how have you applied those lessons to your first full-length album, Seethe?

Zero: Everything prior to Seethe was self-released, sometimes in ridiculously small quantities with homemade packaging. As for lessons learned, the main one we picked up on rather quickly is that we weren't really bothered about success in a commercial sense of the word. We knew we had a niche sound and that we don't have mainstream appeal. The band was always about the members enjoying making noise; the self-releases and the work involved just concreted that approach. If we were doing this with the aim of fame or fortune, we would have hit a wall and given up long ago. Along the way we also became firmer in our resolve that we are never meant to be a polished product. The D.I.Y. ethos behind the band is part of the sound; if the rough edges were smoothed away we wouldn't sound like us anymore. That is who we are, and the fact that some people seem to like it is a bonus.

The album is very eclectic, with elements of punk and techno as well as industrial. If you had to categorize your sound, what would you call it?

Zero: We have absolutely no idea. There is a scene in the UK which has the tag 'industrial punk.' I guess that is as close as we are going to get. I suppose we could be categorised 'electro punk pop New Wave New Romantic thrash techno alternative industrial,' but there aren't many CD racks out there wide enough to fit that label on, so 'industrial punk' will do nicely for now.

Who are some of your own favorite bands, and how, if it all, have they influenced the Flesh Eating Foundation sound?

Zero: We listen to quite a mixture, really, and all of it has a little place in the Flesh Eating Foundation sound if you listen hard enough. The Juddaman and I spent our teenage years listening to a chap called John Peel on the radio. Absolutely anything went on his shows, music from all around the world, from one extreme to another. We also had a love of metal and, to a degree, pop music of the '80s. On our shelves you'd find extensive collections of CDs and vinyl by the Butthole Surfers, The Pixies, Iron Maiden, early Metallica, Killing Joke, Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Controlled Bleeding and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. If you were to roll all that up an a big reefer and smoke it, you might exhale something similar to Flesh Eating Foundation. The sound is heavily electronic because there have only been two pairs of hands for a lot of the time, hence the more industrial direction. If we had been able to have a stable core of more than two people, then the sound might have turned out quite different.

You perform with stage blood and use a lot of zombie imagery. Does the imagery of animate cannibalistic corpses also tie in with the themes of your music? In what ways?

Zero: Sometimes it does, and sometimes we just do it for fun. We have always had a love of horror films and in particular the zombie sub-genre. However, the zombie slant to the band solidified when we released the song 'The Dead.' This is a song about the UK Remembrance Day 'celebrations,' which I feel veer dangerously close to glorifying the heroics of war. The song was basically a reminder that war results in piles of corpses and body parts, and the reasons for war are largely futile. We took that one stage further and reanimated these corpses, and that became the image the band adopts today. It's fun, but there is a sinister edge to it too. Things will probably change again, but for the moment we like the blood and aggression associated with being a zombie band, and we feel it suits the music.

You've done a ton of remix work over the years. Which are your favorites?

Zero: Yeah, we like remixing; it's a nice change and allows us to work with other voices and sounds. The ones I like the most are where I hear a song and can visualise immediately something I'd like to do with it. I then ask the artist, and sometimes they let us do a remix. We also always keep an eye out for any remix kits and competitions that are out there for anything that takes our fancy. I'm quite fond of a mix we did of 'This Is My Rifle' by Combichrist using a remix kit they made available to fans. It never got released, but it seemed to circulate the Net quite widely nonetheless. I also like the mix we did of 'Unreadable Communications' by Curve; Toni Halliday has such a delicious voice, and Dean Garcia seemed to like the mix, too, which was a bonus. I like it when I can use a remix opportunity to turn a song on its head. Very often this will result in a mix not being selected for release because it is not dance floor-friendly, but we enjoy it, so that is all that matters.

Each of you have side projects. Can you tell us a little about them? How do they compare with the work you release as Flesh Eating Foundation?

Zero: We use the FEF banner in different ways for different sounds. There have been a few incarnations, but the two that have seen the most material made available online are Futile Escapist Front and Forced Existence Feedback. The former has an experimental and hypnotic feel to its noise, but there is still a sense of music and melody. We take this project out live from time to time; it is part structured and part improvised, which is fun. Forced Existence Feedback is more about the noise, about textures and dynamics as opposed to melody. I have also released a lot of material under my own name, including a lot of collaborations with other underground artists that fall beyond the scope of FEF. I've worked with hip-hop artists, soul singers, Native American musicians, tabla players and dance artists; it's a blast. The Juddaman also works under his own name and a project called SVAC for his electronic creations; he has a penchant for huge electronic soundscapes.

Now that the album is out, what's next for the Flesh Eating Foundation? Do you have any upcoming projects or plans you can tell us about?

Zero: We are trying to shine as much light on the album as possible at the moment, seeing as RebCo Records was good enough to give it a proper release, so we are taking live shows whenever we can get them and looking for any other opportunities to promote the album. We are also most of the way through recording the next release. This will be the first release under the current line-up of me, the Juddaman and Davros. There will be five or so new tracks and a couple of remixes, one of which will be the competition winner for our current 'Godless' remix competition. If anything, the material is sounding a little more varied than that on Seethe, and the edge is nastier at times, too. We wanted to get this release out quite quickly, toward the end of the summer, as a statement of intent for the current line-up. We also have tracks under way for a full-length follow up for Seethe which will probably surface in some shape or form during 2009.