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Ad·ver·sary

Khan: It was a combination of things. They tried to contact me at around the same time I contacted them, so there was some synchronicity to the situation. With other labels, I was the one getting in touch, I was the one following up on it, and I was the one who was really excited about the release. With Tympanik, it wasn't that way at all. Not only did they try to get in touch with me before I got in touch with them, they made it very clear how much they liked the music and how excited they were about releasing it. I wasn't familiar with many of the artists who'd already released on Tympanik before I came on, but since then they've signed so many fantastic acts; just being on the same label with artists like Stendeck, Flint Glass, and Pneumatic Detatch is good for promotion, to be sure, but it's pretty humbling.

So the album was originally titled International Dark Skies, and once had a much different track listing. Tell us about the development of the music over time and how it culminated into what we now hear on Bone Music.

Khan: International Dark Skies was a demo CD-R that I put together from a handful of mostly-done songs. I was going to be playing a few dates with Terrorfakt and Adam X, and I wanted something that I could give to promoters, DJs, and anyone who liked the music.

So it was never intended that the official album be released in that form?

Khan: Right, it was just a collection of songs from late 2005. After the tour, the demo ended up ripped and on a half-dozen high-traffic MP3 sites, and it started to get reviews and press. From there on in, whenever talking to a label it was always in the context of International Dark Skies as a finished release that they could just print, press, and sell. Tympanik, on the other hand, was interested in seeing it finished.

During the time of the demo, you had done some work with Cyanotic and the Glitch Mode Squad. How did this association come about, and how would you say it's affected your music?

Khan: I heard Transhuman when it came out, and I was completely blown away by it. I think it's the best aggro-industrial album in a long, long time. I got in touch with Sean Payne to let him know how much I liked it, and it became pretty clear that we both had the same ideas about the state of electronic music, what we missed about old industrial, and I ended up working with him to release the Hordes of the Elite compilation on Glitch Mode. Shortly after, I brought Cyanotic up to Ottawa to play two dates, and I played with them on the second night. We had a blast, and Sean invited me to join them on the next Cyanotic tour.

So is it fair to say that your collaboration with Cyanotic will continue?

Khan: That's the plan. Sean is really, really talented, and working with him has raised the bar for my own material, so I'm happy to be involved with whatever it is he's doing; Glitch Mode, Cyanotic, or anything else that comes up.

In recent years, there has been a large influx of predominantly instrumental industrial music. Without the benefit of lyrics and vocals, what sort of themes are you looking to convey in your music? Has it ever been a consideration for you to write music with a vocalist in mind?

Khan: One of the problems with electronic music is just how difficult it is to actually communicate anything. You can try to use samples to help pad things, but it's impossible to tell a story through beeps and kicks. This is why I wrote a paragraph or two for each song in the Bone Music liner notes, to try to provide some context. Most of my songs are about conflict in form or another, and it's impossible to communicate any subtext there without vocals or notes, or something. My sister is an incredible hip-hop MC, and we've tried to work together a few times, but I haven't been able to get vocals to work the way they need to. 'Friends of Father' was written with her vocals in mind. It'd be great if we manage to put something together. I'm also trying to work with my other sister, who is much closer to a soul singer than she is to hip-hop MC.

So you come from a very musical family, evidently. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you first decided to become an industrial musician.

Khan: Music has always been huge in my life, but hip-hop was actually my first love. My sisters and I used to make music videos to NWA and Public Enemy tracks back in grade school. The first time I ever heard industrial, I was 12 and a friend gave me a copy of Tactical Neural Implant on cassette. It was one of those life-changing moments. Honestly, it's just how the music sounds. I can bullshit about Luigi Russolo, the aesthetic of industrial, and whatever else—and don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the history and the aesthetic and everything—but at the end of the day, I'm in love with how it sounds.

Having been involved in hip-hop, what do you see as the correlation between hip-hop and industrial, if you see one? Especially when considering that groups like SMP and Stromkern and even FLA have experimented with mixing hip-hop aesthetics into industrial.

Khan: Early hip-hop is really experimental music. People managed to make gear do things it's not supposed to do, they took fucked up sounds out of context, made field recordings. Pretty much everything that Cabaret Voltaire or Nurse with Wound or any of the early industrial acts did. I'd like to see a return to the cross-genre experimentation that hip-hop used to have, Body Count, Public Enemy and Anthrax, etc. The new Saul Williams record that Trent Reznor produced is probably the closest thing we're going to get.

You spoke earlier about how you and Sean Payne share similar opinions on the state of electronic music. What are your opinions, and what do you think can and should be done to change things for the better?

Khan: People just need to listen to more music, and that goes double for people making music. It's easy to play to your crowd, but I think it's important to play outside your crowd. An Ad·ver·sary/Memmaker tour would be fun, but a Cyanotic/Memmaker tour would be much, much more interesting to me. Clubs used to play Nitzer Ebb next to Test Dept. and Lords of Acid, but you're not going to hear more than one or two types of music at an industrial night unless it's retro. There's a lot of really great music being made right now that no one hears because the power noise DJs only play power noise, the industrial rock DJs only play industrial rock, and the EBM DJs only play synthpop. It's frustrating how much airtime synthpop gets, considering how far removed it is from the rest of the genre, and by 'the rest of the genre' I actually mean 'industrial music.'

So now that Bone Music has been released, what's next for Ad·ver·sary?

Khan: A tour, maybe? A remix album in the fall. I'm producing an electro/industrial album for a new project called CIR, which will hopefully see the light soon. Beyond that, I'm not sure. I'd like to finish up a concept EP I'm working on, a soundtrack to a children's creation myth I'm writing called The Raven Prince. It's a fairy tale about how Raven created the world, the kind of thing that a kid could read at bedtime over an evening or two, and I'm writing the music as a soundtrack to that. Something you could fall asleep to when you're young, kind of like Synaesthesia or early Delerium.