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An Interview with Jason Novak of Acumen Nation
Posted: Sunday, September 24, 2006
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

In the mid '90s, coldwave was a pretty big deal in the music scene. Even in the mainstream, more and more bands were employing the use of synthesizers and electronic production techniques to offer a true alternative to the standard formulas of pop and rock and roll music. Groups like Nine Inch Nails, Gravity Kills, Stabbing Westward, and White Zombie emerged in the popular market while more underground groups like 16volt, Chemlab, The Clay People, and even older groups like Ministry and KMFDM flourished as proponents for true angst and countering the corporate-run music industry that would soon take over the public's sensibilities. Chicago's Acumen Nation was but one of these groups, but they steadily gained a loyal audience among disillusioned and the disenfranchised youth.

Of course, Acumen Nation was not immune to the familiar perils of the music world, such as changing record labels, lineup changes, touring, and the overall shift in the masses towards consumerism over consciousness. Nonetheless, the band has trudged forward, becoming the flagship for Cracknation. Continuing to conjure up new cauldrons of coldwave for their legion of crack whores, both in Acumen Nation and the electronic offshoot DJ? Acucrack, the band has progressively striven to up the ante. After the somewhat tepid response their 2003 effort, Lord of the Cynics, received, maligned by many for less-than-adequate production quality, the band has spent the better part of the last two years honing their skills to release an album of pure, unadulterated kickasserole.

After almost a year of waiting, Acumen Nation has made good on their promises. Signing to Phoenix-based metal label Crash Music, the band has finally released Anticore, an album full of blistering guitars, pummeling percussion, and electronics that sting like a syringe full of cyanide. Owing as much to their industrial rock roots as it does to the hardcore metal scene, Anticore stands up to the hardest, loudest, and most technical music put out by bands like Meshuggah, The Dillinger Escape Plan, and even Tool. Band leader Jason Novak shares his rage with ReGen, touching on the political nature of Anticore and just what goes on in the world to fuel his angry fire, from religion to politics to music to today's youth.

Anticore is your first album of new material as Acumen Nation since 2003's Lord of the Cynics. As the What the F**k? retrospective was released on WTII Records, what prompted the band to move to Crash Music for the release of Anticore?

Novak: We have just been progressively moving more towards a metal sound; even with Lord of the Cynics and a little bit on The 5ifth Column, we knew we were gravitating more towards this style. With the dwindling numbers of fans of industrial metal—they seem to be dropping off as far as the industrial community goes—but in the metal community, if you flip-flop the hyphen and call it 'metal industrial,' there are a lot more people who are into metal that has sound effects and loops and stuff like that. We wanted to tap into a bigger audience than we could, so we went searching for a label that was part of that scene, because we knew when metal fans heard this record, they'd say, 'Holy shit, I've got to check this out.' But we've known from our experience with running our label how hard it is to tap into a scene of people that kind of has its links to bands and labels, so we were really lucky to find Crash, who really dug the album, and the deal we struck allowed for us to be able to tap into their fan base and the type of people that they reach. Our whole goal is to reach new fans with this album.

It is way more metal than I ever expected from Acumen Nation. You've stated that you wanted Anticore to kill in both the metal and the industrial communities. Do you feel that you've achieved what you set out to achieve?

Novak: I think we personally feel that way. Music fans these days are pretty pigeonholed, and I've been hoping that over the past couple of years with the advent of MySpace and iTunes and people just finding all kinds of music, it seems like the genre barriers are getting battered down no matter what they can come up with to try to pigeonhole music even more. I think we succeeded, but we'll see what music fans think. So far, all the Acumen fans we've heard from are really into the record. They're not at all disturbed by the amount of guitar on there, but now we have to see if we're going to open the door to new metal fans and if they're going to be put off by the samples and the loops, but I think when we were finished, we said, 'We did it.' We failed on Cynics, I think, and we spent so much time putting The 5ifth Column together that I think we achieved a little bit more of the electronic side on that record. I think that had a good balance, but we were really disappointed in the guitar sounds and the crunchiness of the production, and I think we nailed everything that we wanted to on this record. We all agreed that if this is the last record we ever do, we'll be finally, after years and years, happy with the results. Even back to Transmissions you might be able to look at the past 10 years and the way that music has evolved, but even back then, the music that we listened to and were inspired by were the same styles that we listen to and are inspired by now. Melding guitars and electronics back then might have just been a less ferocious attempt at what we're doing now, but it's still kind of the same thing.

It's good that you mention going back to the old stuff, because included on Anticore is a new recording of 'No Arms No Legs,' which goes all the way back to the first album, and you have been known to do updated versions of past songs. Why did the band choose to update this particular song?

Novak: Mostly because we had done it live. A couple of years ago, we detuned the guitars and came up with a new version of it that we really enjoyed playing live. We've always been trying to play old material and keep it new. Let's face it, if you're selling out stadiums, you'd fucking play your old music and you'd play it exactly the way people expect you to, but we're tiny enough that for the fans that do care, we're going to be bored to death playing that. We have the leverage and the leeway to be experimental, so we've always taken old tunes and kind of updated them and changed the electronics and the tempo. That one really stuck with us, and because of how heavy it became, it seemed like an obvious choice to update for the record. I don't want to lean towards the fact that this could be our last record. I don't think this is the last record, but we've gone through so much in the past few years, and a lot of things have been changing in Cracknation, that we kind of felt, 'You know what? We're going to put everything into one fucking record.' And as a last gasp, we got it to a new label, and hopefully we'll breathe some new life into the project, but there were moments when we thought, 'This could be it, so let's just do everything that we want,' and that included taking one of the songs from the first record and revamping it. There are even some sound effects towards the end of the record that are the very first things you hear on Transmissions.

Near the tail end of Anticore, the songs get a little more electronic, and you think, 'Now, I'm starting to recognize some of this.'

Novak: Yeah, whether or not that was a hint, we just definitely felt like taking a few moments to acknowledge where we started and where we are now. And that's why we almost shied away from 15 songs. Jesus Christ. You could have easily pulled three or four of those tunes off and started working on another record for later, but again, we just felt a sense of finality, and I'm not saying that it is final, but we just wanted to make one giant complete stab, and that's kind of why we wrote the album for so long and put everything that we've been working on into it.

This particular lineup has been together since Strike 4, after six years. How has the group dynamic changed among the four of you? How did the band adjust its working process during the making of Anticore, if at all?

Novak: Cynics was such a bad experience for us because Jamie was gone for most of it, but we knew we couldn't sit around and wait and wait. He was off doing his job, which caused him to tour manage and do sound for months on end. So we would just work, the three of us, that's Eliot, Dan, and I, and this time around Jamie said, 'I'm committed to making a better album.' And we all agreed that there were problems with Cynics that Jamie could've fixed, had he been more involved. This time around, it was a much more collaborative effort in the studio. A lot of times the band will just record material and then Jamie or I will sit for hours on ProTools. This time around, we all worked together in the studio, and we all edited little bits and pieces and brought in samples, and it was a much more collaborative effort. Even the guys in the band who aren't as savvy with the equipment, they would still just be in the room for the first time for hours coming up with cool ideas. In the past, it's always been that I would write the music, the band would all put in their two cents, record the music together, and then everyone goes away while Jamie and I produce the record. This time, all four of us were involved in all stages, which was pretty cool.

I was wondering about that, because this is the first time that the other band members are credited with the songwriting. Usually, the songs are all you, but Dan got co-writing credit for 'Bliss,' Jamie did the music to 'P.O.D.O.A.,' and the whole band is credited for 'The Blind Pig.'

Novak: Yeah, and even when we did Cynics, the listing says 'Music by Acumen Nation,' because Jamie was on tour for quite a bit, but the three of us would sit down and we would just jam. That's why we have this little side project. I don't know if it will ever see the light of day, but it's called Brown 25, and it's all these really detuned mathematical instrumental metal pieces that we would kind of jam through, and the jams that came out of that we'd pull and start writing songs out of it. We kept a lot of that material for this Brown 25 project, but that was a cool way to write. And then we brought in Brian Elza to play guitar with us live. We've known him for a while, and we all agreed that I should just do the vocals and not be tied down by a guitar, which for performance reasons definitely has worked. Brian went back to school, and he played a couple of parts on the record, and hopefully he'll be with us on tour, and if we all stick together and write another record, you'll probably see the band listed as a five-piece, because he brings a lot of cool stuff to the table. But it was just so piecemeal during the creation of this record that we still felt like we're just the four of us and we've got this guy adding a little bit, but if we stick it out, we might consider ourselves a five-piece.

Listening to Anticore, some of it reminded me of Strike 4 in the sense that the electronics were kind of toned down compared to records like The 5ifth Column. What made you guys decide to go for this heavy guitar-based sound on Anticore?

Novak: It was 100 percent personal opinion. It wasn't a conscious effort, as in, 'We need to change our sound a little bit,' whereas Strike 4 was a conscious effort to do that. This was just, 'What do we want this record to sound like?' And we made it sound exactly the way we wanted. There were moments, like you said, towards the end of the record, where there were parts where we wanted to really crank the electronics. And there were other parts where the production was suffering from it, and we achieved, in our opinion, this really great drum and guitar mix, and we thought that this was the best that we've ever been able to make the drums and guitar sound. Jamie and I had discussions along the way, like, 'You know, we're sort of ditching our sound in favor of a better sound.' And then Jamie would say, 'Well, not necessarily, but you realize we're making decisions based on sonic quality instead of the Acumen sound,' so to speak. So we found ourselves ditching little elements because they were distorting the mix or they were taking away from the sonic quality. We fought hard, and I have to say, there could've been a way for this album to have zero electronics on it, and to the ear it might have sounded like a better piece of production, but then we really would've fucked ourselves and have no desire to be who we are. But we were getting bitten by this feeling of production quality and wanting to finally make this record. I keep going back to Cynics because we were so disappointed in the drum mix on that record.

I didn't even notice that until I heard Anticore.

Novak: Yeah, and we hope, god willing, that this record does well enough that we can convince Crash to let us remix Cynics and re-release it, and that'll only work if we gain a couple thousand new fans that might bite on a re-release of the last record, you know, produced a little bit better. We even did a studio remix of 'The Paralysis is Real' off of that record for the What the F**k? release, and again, the one thing you can tell in that, if you listen to them side by side, is the drum mix and the production quality. It's sort of like in the old days, the first few records, the less you know, the more you experiment, the better things turn out. And then during the middle, for us producing The 5ifth Column and Cynics, we started to learn and know a lot more about what we were doing. And then you kind of cheat yourself by trying to get things to sound right, and then we'd listen and be like, 'Wow man, where is the noise? Where is this bombastic quality that those earlier albums had?' And then we realized that our ears are kind of wanting things to sound cleaner and better, and that's where we'd argue during Anticore, like, 'Fucking A, man! Crank that shit, make it ugly!' We can't make it sound so well-produced that we lose a sense of who we are. I hope it came across, but there are parts of Anticore that I listen to and say, 'Man, that loop or that sound effect should be ripping through the speakers.'

It seems like that's why you started DJ? Acucrack in the first place. Going for a cleaner sound, you went one way with one project, and kept the other one pure to what you wanted.

Novak: As talented as I think Jamie is, when you listen to some of these records—and I would never want to champion Linkin Park for a second other than to say, 'Okay, they have millions of fucking dollars to produce these albums,' and like the Rob Zombie stuff, and Fear Factory—they have a decent budget, they can hire excellent people with amazing skills to really define those electronics and those natural music pieces to the point where the mix is completely full, and you can hear every little element. We're producing, I think, really good music, but we don't have thousands of dollars to master and to hire talented engineers to come in and pick everything apart working on a massive SSL board, you know what I mean? We don't have that, so it's like we were trying to do too much, and we started to get discouraged on some of those earlier albums, and I think it scared us away as time went on to try to pull everything off without that kind of a budget.

There's always a great deal of programming going on in Acumen's music. What is the process like to balance the programming with Dan's live drumming?

Novak: Well, a lot of times in the past, we used to just say, 'Hey drummer! Here are the loops, and we've built the song on certain programs, now you play along to it.' In this process with Dan, and especially on this last record, we would sit and learn from the way he would play drums to a tune that we would write, and then we'd put together rudimentary sequences and loops and then we would play that back with him again and notice, 'There's an accent on his snare here, but we're accenting the next snare. Let's not do that and not tell Dan that he has to change our accents and move stuff around.' In the past, we'd always edit drums to fit the sequences, and now we're editing sequences to fit the drums. I think there are a lot of little surprises with the drumming on this record that we haven't done before, because we've been too headstrong in our little programming ways that we made the drummer bow down to us, and now we've decided to go another route and switch it, and I think the results are much better.

Going back to what you were said before about Linkin Park and Rob Zombie, you have songs like 'Queener,' 'Bandroid,' and 'Margasuck' where you've been pretty vocal about your discontent with the music scene. How do you feel Anticore reflects these attitudes?

Novak: All you need to do is listen to the lyrics to that 'P.O.D.O.A.' track and you'll pretty much see that we're still on the same thought wave. You have to admit that some of it could be jealousy, and I'll just say that because I don't want to be a complete hypocrite, so I'm not going to pretend. At the same time, it's not real jealousy, like, 'God, we're really jealous of those guys.' I think it's more that they're writing some of the stupidest hooks and the worst lyrics you could possibly imagine. You can actually take a couple of songs, I think like with Nickelback and Linkin Park, where you could take a song from one album and a song from the second album, and put one on the left channel and one on the right, and they are identical in structure, identical in the hook manufacturing, and the lyrics are such bargain basement cliché-ridden shit. That's why with bands like P.O.D., we'd listen to the lyrics and say, 'Oh my god, they just opened the book of clichés, and they're just stringing them together,' and it's the same thing with Linkin Park. And again, we're not going to offend anybody that really matters, so we never even pay attention to the fact that we've publicly said this. Dude, these are not your words! These are the world's classic standard clichés, or even new pop culture clichés, like 'How you like me now,' and that enters the lexicon, and bands are like, 'Oh, let me be the first to grab it and put it in a tune.' I remember some bad ska-rock song called 'What's the Dilly Yo?,' a few years ago, and people were saying it, and then, 'Oh, I'm going to put it in my song first.' You want to shoot this lyricist in the face; how dare this person get the opportunity to reach the masses and have their album out when the best they can do is pilfer the pop culture lexicon of shit that no one will be saying in six months? So that's why, again noting that we can't say, 'No we're not jealous,' but the jealousy is that other people are afforded the opportunity to speak to millions or hundreds of thousands of people, and the best they can do is that. There are some of us out there, at least we think, with meaningful poetic lyrics that we feel we have written ourselves. Every time I come across a line in my music that sounds like it could've been derived from something else, we go and change it, and I think we've done that musically quite a bit, which is why we've raised a glass and said, 'Yeah, there's no fucking way we're ever going to make it,' because we trash every decent hook we write. We don't ever play it the same way twice. We make sure to kind of sabotage it in some way so that it doesn't sound so damn obvious like most of the successful music these days. I'll try to wrap it up, but when you've got these bands that are sort of borrowing the style of industrial metal or using electronics or whatever, whether it was Disturbed or Powerman 5000, but they're just destroying its ingenuity with hooks and bad lyrics, verse-chorus-verse-chorus, instrumental, quiet verse, etc., it's like, 'Come on, man! Use your brain a little bit.'

On Linkin Park's second album, they have notes where they talk about their songwriting process, and I'm reading it thinking, 'You guys think you're so clever, don't you?'

Novak: And it's sort of like the Kennedy Assassination, and it's hard to believe that there's not a band out there that will come forth and say, 'Yes, once we were making our second or third album for this major, we had a fucking hit-maker come in and a producer who worked us to the bone,' and they might say, 'Here's my little riff,' and then bitch slap, bitch slap. The next thing you know, it's this amazing polished piece of radio shit, and they'll take credit for writing it, saying, 'But we wrote the tune,' and it's like, 'You didn't really write it, you didn't arrange it.' People are brought in to make sure that that shit is well taken care of and hooks are brought out at the right time and the right way, that the intro is the exact length that a market research campaign showed them that a radio song should be, and you get put through this boy band process, and it's a shame. Maybe after they've moved on, they'll admit to it, but that hit factory is sort of like if you open your mouth, they'll drop you.

Like what happened to Eric Powell of 16volt with Capitol Records.

Novak: My god! Didn't that make you sick? That story just had me on the edge of my seat, like, 'Oh my god, I can't believe you went through that!'

But it's good when people come out and say something, just hoping that people will pay attention.

Novak: On the flip side of that, you have to hope. Just being part of the metal community, bands like Mastodon and Lamb of God have recently been afforded the chance to sign major label deals, and there's no fucking with that music, because they're never going to get those guys to write a radio song, and the A&R guys have admitted as much, like, 'We're trusting this community and we're trusting this music to stand on its own.' And you hope that they stick by that, and that that's a new wave of possibilities for heavy music, because we firmly believe that their thirst and the like just killed it dead. It got so big, that kind of rap-rock and metal, and it was riding this huge wave, and then everybody just sort of looked around and said, 'Oh my god, this is the dumbest shit I've ever heard.' You know, P.O.D. and Linkin Park, these lyrics are horrible, and they're not even playing music. They're just playing the same note. And then radio bailed on it, the industry just bailed on it, and we're so far below the radar that I probably shouldn't even comment on what the industry is up to, but at the same time, everybody ran and hid for a minute, like, 'Oh my god, we just got so stupid.' And now, metal is making kind of this comeback only a couple of years later, and it's being championed by some really smart bands, and people are out there seeking the smartest metal they can find, and I think that's a breath of fresh air. God forbid that Trustkill and Victory don't destroy that, because everything they do, they've followed a major label model in my opinion, trying to find every metalcore-sounding, goth-metal, crybaby, emo, whiny shit. Now there's this really funny amalgam that's been produced from that, and I don't even know what they're calling it, but it's got the most brutal verse that you can find, and the gayest '80s metal chorus that you can find, and they're putting them together in the most hilarious fashion, and again you can sort of read between the lines of that song and see how this has been crafted and put together to mimic every other hit in that market. The song starts, and you're like, 'Yeah, this is awesome!' And then the chorus hits, and you're like, 'No!' You know, those bad '80s solo licks and terrible ballad vocals. I don't know where they came up with this, but it makes me sad; 'Let's get Hatebreed verses and then Winger choruses. Yeah, that's going to be hot.'

We've talked about Acumen Nation's sense of humor, and I have to tell you that 'Haliburton Rape Trial' had me in stitches with its clips from Heavy Metal. What is the story behind this track? Is there any serious purpose to it, or is it just meant to be funny?

Novak: It's not meant to be funny as much as it's meant to just say that we're aware. That song purposefully doesn't have any lyrics, because in a lot of the lyric-writing process, I just made sure, and I might have failed, but in my opinion I didn't want to 'Talk about the children,' and 'We got to save these guys,' and 'We have to go rescue whoever,' and 'This minority's being pushed down.' I have no business saying that, but we felt that it would be a lot easier to swallow than to just point out the enemy and to say, 'Look at what the enemy is doing.' There are so many 'Light a candle' and 'We are the children' kind of songs of a political nature, and that just didn't seem like something that we wanted to do. We wanted to be a little more to the point and shine the light on how evil this whole corporate culture of government has gotten around the world. And with 'Haliburton Rape Trial,' it was like, 'How am I going to write lyrics about Haliburton now?' And it just seemed stupid and impossible, and anything I came up with, I just went, 'That's gay. Forget it!' So it just became this instrumental piece with the obvious nature of those Heavy Metal samples playing out that they're guilty of everything that they've done, and everyone knows it. I hope that I don't have to read any reviews of this album that say, 'Yeah, yeah, we get it. You're pissed off, the world sucks.' But it seems like there's such a lack of that these days. Everybody's in everybody else's pocket. The complacency of youth today is just the most disgusting thing I've ever witnessed. It's so like The Matrix. These kids really are in those cocoons, and the energy that they're giving the government is their parents' money, and they just sit in front of the video game, and they sit in front of the MySpace, and they're not paying any attention, and meanwhile, their future is being stolen right in front of their eyes. Their baby boomer parents are too focused on the grave and what's coming up next as their hair begins to whiten to really pay attention. I've never seen such a lack of youth movement in my life. It's disgusting! So again, we were afforded the opportunity to reach a new audience and to find kids in this metal community, and if we didn't put our politics first right now, I think shame on anybody that doesn't. Right now is a seriously sad time for music and politics, and I think there's never been a time when we needed it more.

Look at what happened in Thailand. They basically did rise up and do something, and I watch that on the news, and I realized that we don't do that here.

Novak: There's nothing. And the people who can talk about Kent State and Vietnam, they're the ones who bought into selling out the country the most and not educating their children. You need to look to the parents. So how is it that these parents, these really strict '50s values parents, were able to pretty much protest and cause this shit to happen in the streets and pretty much shut down the Vietnam war? You know, a lot of damage had been done, and it was a little late, but they managed to do it, but they were the product of these conservative parents. Now, these liberal baby boomers raised a generation of kids that were the opposite. They taught them nothing. So now what is it going to take? Yet another generation to go by before there's any kind of movement? I'm proud to watch Bill Maher and Henry Rollins; there's nothing attached to it, no movement of youth that has any sort of protest or any sort of voice. The Democratic Party alone...shame, motherfucking shame! I have to say we need to put a Democrat in office and we need to go that route, but they're just a bunch of pussies and they have no ideas of their own. Anyway, 'Haliburton Rape Trial' was just a way to channel our rage but not write an overly political tune about a company. It seemed appropriate, and again, it's not like the album's going to sell enough that we're going to get a call from anybody.

Also on Anticore is the original version of 'My Life's Last Breath,' with Lucia Cifarelli of KMFDM on vocals. How did she come to be involved in the song?

Novak: We had talked after touring about doing a track together, and when we started demo-ing this material, we sent her a few songs. I actually had wanted her to do 'Black Son Hole,' which she was interested in doing, but I made sure that she stopped and read the lyrics and understood the point of the tune. My reason for doing this was to protect it and make sure; again, we're so small, nobody's going to fucking pay attention, but you never know, and I just wanted to make sure that she understood what that song is about and how it attacks the moguls of rap and black culture in general for turning its back on its own sad state of affairs in order to make money off of glorifying drug culture and gang culture. I think there's a few lyrics in that song where I think it's pretty bold for a white boy to point out, and I just wanted her to make sure that she knew what she was getting into. She read through, and said, 'You know, you have a point. I believe you and agree with you 100 percent. I just don't know if it's my voice that should be pushing that along.' She made a very good point that she obviously agreed with what I was saying, but it wasn't her voice, and so she felt that she'd be a little more comfortable with the subject matter of 'My Life's Last Breath,' which is more of an anti-religion kind of song. So that seemed a little bit more like something she could probably be a part of and put her stamp on.

It's my second favorite song on the album next to 'Branch Davidian Style.' It's the first song I heard on that $1.00 Cracknation compilation you guys had, and I've tried to wean myself off of that song, but I always think, 'This song is so heavy!'

Novak: It's really funny too, because then we wrote 14 more tunes and made a whole record, and when it came time to promote the new record and choose a song, we said, 'Branch Davidian Style.' It seemed like the last choice we should make, that we should pick something new, but we really wanted it.

It's actually thanks to that track that I started listening to Meshuggah. I'm a King Crimson fan, but I didn't even know who they were, but now listening to them, I think that Anticore stands up to Meshuggah.

Novak: That is a sweet compliment. We'd never even try though, I tell you. There were moments where we said, 'Why don't we math that up a little,' and we wrote this track that we haven't done anything with, and we called it 'Remedial Math,' because we're like, 'Yeah, let's try to do some hot signatures here,' and then it's just like, 'Oh my god, we need to work a couple more years on that.'

I know what you mean. Every time I listen to King Crimson, I'm on the verge of quitting playing guitar.

Novak: I know! And you want to try to do it, but I do think there's a lot of it out there that is a little manufactured. But the magic of Meshuggah and The Dillinger Escape Plan is that those guys didn't want to emulate anybody. They just said, 'You know what? I've got an idea, and it's totally fucked up.' And the other guys in the band go, 'Wow! I get it, and I'm going to play that fucked up thing with you.' That's what I admire most about Dillinger and Meshuggah, because one guy can come up with this, but all those guys just locked into that madness? That's insane.

Do you think you're going to go more metal on future Acumen releases if you get to that point? The 5ifth Column and Lord of the Cynics both have a lot of drum 'n' bass and electronic elements, not that they're not there on Anticore, but do you think you're really going to keep pushing for this metal sound?

Novak: I have no idea. We get into something, we try it, and then we move on. It all has to do with what appeals to us at the time. Like, you mention the drum 'n' bass stuff in Acucrack; we were producing a lot of drum 'n' bass, and we were really fascinated with that. We really wanted to try and mix it up with the guitar in Acumen, like on 'Metard,' 'Spill Throat,' 'Just a Bastard,' and 'Rally and Sustain.' People love those tunes, and we played them for years. They were just champion tunes that really worked out well. But then, we wanted to try something else. We're constantly trying to energize ourselves by what's turning us on at the moment, and then trying to successfully integrate that into Acumen Nation without really changing the sound too much. I don't know. Right now, we're all pretty burnt out on music in general, and the only thing that turns us on is as extreme as you can get. Now, that doesn't mean we're going to get out and make that extreme music just to emulate it, but when we're trying to find the craziest shit we can find to listen to because it's the only thing that makes us happy, then when we turn to write our own music, it might reflect it. At the time of making the early Acumen records, four-on-the-floor Wax Trax stuff was such a huge part of our lives, and Jack Dangers. We've always been guys who pick up a guitar and write a tune. Every single record, you could play an unplugged version of it, and it wouldn't sound too bad. I think that the electronics elements that we've always used, be it drum 'n' bass or noise metal bits or breakbeat or four-on-the-floor, they've always just been an addition to what is really just a melody and a vocal in a tune. So it's hard for us to say what we'll do next. Will it be more of this or more of that? You could take all the albums we've ever done and strip out the electronics, and get a different band in and show them how to play the tune, and they'd all stand up as just musical numbers, so I don't know. We never really relied solely on the electronics to bring across a tune to where we couldn't play it live. I think I'm probably muddling the point, but it's just that getting involved in a style of electronic music for an album or two is just something that gets our attention. In a couple of years, I don't know where we'll be or what we'll be into, but I can imagine that it won't get quieter or softer.

You know, we've always flirted with the industrial community saying, 'There's too much guitars.' And like you brought up earlier, Acucrack was kind of born from that desire from people who wanted just to hear the electronics. But we made that mistake on Strike 4 of trying to make something that wasn't us, because we felt we were drowning. The label had closed down and we had one chance to maybe get some people who might give us a chance into it, and it was like if we were going to write a hit or a hook, write it now and get the deal, and really the choice to make any kind of record we would want. But in the end, we ended up not getting any kind of deal, and we turned off some of our fans, and it'll be the last time we do anything for any other reason than we're really feeling it. I love the songs on Strike 4, but I just don't think they're Acumen tunes, and that's where we kind of failed. Now it's the kind of idea of how do we use everything that we've learned about making electronic loops and synths and all that stuff. Now, it's not going to have anything to do with the band's community. 'Black Son Hole' is about as close as you'll get to the old Acumen sound.

It is probably the closest, and 'P.O.D.O.A.' as well, because it's a lot more jungle, but then you come in with that death growl.

Novak: Before, we were really concerned because dance and club music helped make us who we are, so we can't forget them. We got to play something that's got the groove in it, and the album has to have a little bit of that groove in it.

Besides your work in the Cracknation, you're also a husband and a father. With so much work under your belt in Acumen and Acucrack, and your other projects like Fawn and Glytsch, how do you balance your time between working on music and being a family man?

Novak: It's next to impossible, and there's been a lot less time. That's why with Glytsch, Dean and I have never really gotten to the point where we could make a full album of music. That's why Fawn never had a chance, because I couldn't tour for Fawn and make a run at it. There are all these things that I want to do, but at the end of the day, I've got to put food on the table and I have to concentrate on the bands and the albums that have the best shot of making it worthwhile. That's why I'll put out compilations and there will be a song or two from these bands, because I can't make it my fulltime job just to have nothing but these different bands and give them their shot. It's been hard, and I've had to go for months without working on something because I have to work on a production piece for money or something like that, and it has been three years since the last Acumen album, and Acucrack probably won't produce a new record for a couple more years. I'm just exhausted. The family dynamic is that I work from home, which is good because I can pick my son up from school and I'm more hands-on as a parent, and that's why touring is so difficult, as opposed to a guy who works from nine to five and never sees his kids, and then he goes off to tour. They wouldn't really notice. But here, it's a big deal, but it's cool. It means I need to steal away in the middle of the night and not sleep, you know? Get into the studio and tweak something and work on something so I can handle the responsibilities of being a father. Eric Powell and I talked about it a lot, and we've gotten rid of a lot of the dreams and aspirations part of making music, and now it's like, 'Do we get to play a show? Do we get to be fathers?' And if we can do both to any degree, then we're the fucking luckiest people in the world. That's why I do this instead of jerking off and making another Splynter Group record that's probably not going to make as much of an impact on my time as Acumen or Acucrack, because I just don't have the ability to break a new band. That's for damn sure.

Having been involved in making music for more than a decade, and being instrumental in the '90s coldwave movement, what are your thoughts on the recent resurgence of industrial rock, metal and coldwave, with older groups like 16volt, Chemlab, and Acumen Nation releasing new material as well as new groups like Rabbit Junk, Cyanotic, and Manufraqture?

Novak: I have no idea, only because whether or not artists are coming out and putting out material is one thing, but how well they're supported, the whole touring aspect...we watched the PIG tour fall apart. Cyanotic had to cancel halfway through. I'm not even going to get into the Front Line cancellations, because that's a whole different story. That was a big political thing, and the shows were well-attended. But we know for a fact that we can't really get out there and tour because there's just not enough of a support scene. That's unfortunate because if coldwave, or whatever it's going to be, was going to be resurgent, then it's resurgent because there are people out there supporting it. There could be 20 albums that come out this year from every band that was ever on Reconstriction or Fifth Column and all that, but would people buy it? Would people be a part of it? I hate to put it in a monetary arena, but I can't tour and play to 20 people. Cyanotic can't. Even a young band, 10 years younger than me, they can't afford to get up there and do that. When we were all touring 10 years ago, we could count on a hundred people in a venue, and there'd be a little write-up in the paper, and this was even before the Web had gotten as important as it is now, but it would be promoted underground, the way it used to be. Now with the Web, there are so many more avenues of promotion, but there are so many more bands and artists and people to pay attention to that you can't get a solid fan base of people to show up and support the show. I've been asked the question before in interviews what I would tell a young band that was getting into this, and I said, 'I'd knock a zero off of your expectations for anything.' If you think your goal is going to be a thousand, it's going to be a hundred, dude. Make sure you can sell a hundred copies, and give 500 copies away, and then be happy. It'll never pay the bills, but if you can be happy with that small amount of people that will be into you, then it's cool. I don't know if coldwave is making a comeback. I don't know how many copies the Chemlab record sold, but I know the whole underground music industry in general is selling at about a tenth to a sixth of what they're used to, and you've really got to be prepared to accept that. It's really hard for people to financially support themselves, even as a hobby, to put these records out. Jared can't fucking fly over here and tour the States. He can only do some one-off shows. That's why we were able to go out with KMFDM. I'd love to get out on the road right now and do it ourselves, but we know damn well that we can't. It'll crash and burn and we'll all go home about halfway through unless we hook up with two or three other bands and make a package of it. So musically, I'm proud to see those bands back in action. I can't wait to hear the new 16volt record. I just hope that there are enough fans out there to receive them.

In metal, punk rock, and even dance music, there's so much youth getting infused in it and so many young people getting into it. Coldwave and industrial failed to attach any sort of significance with the youth, and those are the people that are going to blog the shit out of it and put it on MySpace and wear the T-shirts out in public. How many 35-year-old guys are you going to see with a T-shirt that says, 'I don't fucking care,' or something like that on it? Kids would love that shit, and I think it'd be great. But this style of music for whatever reason could not find new blood, and that's why I think it stagnated so much as a popular form of music, because the ideas are cool and the production is cool. There's no youth out there spreading the word and getting their parents' money to help fund it. That's a really crass way to look at it, but it's a part of the success of any underground scene, this rabid youth behind it. Coldwave and industrial have lost the youth, and that's why it's so hard for it to be successful.