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An Interview with Sean Payne of Cyanotic
Posted: Sunday, April 29, 2007
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

In the new age of digital download, Cyanotic has arisen to reclaim the industrial rock throne from the electronic underground. Violating the sonic landscape through the use of innovative new technologies and blending genres across the board, from power noise to drum 'n' bass, from EBM to coldwave, this Chicago-based band exemplify the spirit of development and futurism that once drove the majority of electronic music. After their debut EP, Mutual Bonding Through Violation, the band followed up with Transhuman, an album that was more than the sum of its influences, presenting their heavy sound with fervor and rage at a scene that had forgotten how to evolve. Further developing their sound through two years of touring and appearances on various remix and tribute albums, Cyanotic has signed to BitRiot, a subsidiary of WTII Records, to release their new double-disc set Transhuman 2.0, which features not only new interpretations and versions of the songs on Transhuman, but also appearances by members of Front Line Assembly, 16volt, and Rabbit Junk. Cyanotic's founder, Sean Payne, took some time to connect with the ReGen machine and offer his input into the underground program, discussing the new album, the upcoming tour and lineup, and even the satisfaction of the dystopic films that have for decades been predicting a future on the verge of annihilation.

Transhuman 2.0 is the follow up to Transhuman, featuring various versions of songs from that album, but you've stated that it's not intended to be a remix album. Can you please elaborate on this? If these are not remixes, what would you call them?

Payne: I guess they're just more like alternate versions or visions. I approached it in a way that I could say, 'Here's the original Transhuman, and here are the updates,' and it would be able to efficiently show what we've learned. We've gained some friends in decently good places in the last two years, and they all wanted to work on stuff, so since I didn't have any new material ready, I just gave 'em the tracks and said, 'OK, want to take a crack at this with us?' This was right around the time that the original Transhuman sold out, last August. I had to repress it, and I was really contemplating if I wanted to just flat out reissue the original Transhuman, or if I wanted to throw on some goodies. Needless to say, goodies won out.

We're going to sell the two CDs for the price of one CD, and hopefully that will get some more people into it. If I saw a $20 price tag on a double-CD from some band, any band, I'd be like, 'Fuck you! I'll just go download it.' I'm sure people are going to download this CD, and I find people sharing Transhuman on peer-to-peer programs all the time. I don't mind it, I can't mind it as it's unavoidable, but I do hope that people buy it so I can stay in business for a bit more.

These are alternate versions, not just a remix with an extra four-on-the-floor house loop, but different enough that we changed the titles to a couple tracks.

It took me awhile to realize what the original songs were from the new titles. Like on 'Chaos Incarnate,' it took me awhile to realize it was 'Order Out of Chaos.'

Payne: That 'Chaos Incarnate' line, I heard it the day I got that mix from Chris from Front Line Assembly, as I was watching Clerks II, and Dante says to Randal, 'You're the fuckin' chaos incarnate!' 'Antithesis' became 'Pro-Dissonance.' I was trying to make them different without making them new songs, because if I just wanted to make new songs, I'd release a new fucking CD. But I felt like those songs could be attacked in a different way, so over the past two years, I've learned what works well live and what works well on CD. I've learned what people listen for and I've learned what I listen for. Some of the things aren't the same as what I was originally putting on Transhuman.

I had no interest in just straight up repressing Transhuman, so when the time came and I had the money, I was like, 'Fuck, I'll just do a two-disc. It'll be fun this way. I'll get Rabbit Junk and Front Line Assembly and 16volt.' That was cool because it is essentially still our debut album and we've got all these people I was looking up to, like eight to 10 years ago. Even Rabbit Junk, because I was the biggest fucking Shizit fan in 1999. I'd show everybody The Shizit. That was really one of the main influences to start Cyanotic.

I think everybody who has heard it has agreed that it's not just a tacked on bonus disc of douchebag remixes. It's actually a confident reworking of the album. I took the Further Down the Spiral approach to it. Unlike that album, though, I didn't go insane with it and want to totally deconstruct them into noise songs; I wanted to reinvent the tracks to our best abilities. We've learned a lot in the past two years or so, and I just wanted to apply it to those songs. Those songs have been with me for...Jesus, some of those songs are really old.

Some of the songs were on the Mutual Bonding through Violation EP, right?

Payne: Yeah, and that was four years ago, and those songs were old then. Some of those songs were two years old then. Some of these songs are now five or six years old. There's one in particular that has gone through about 25 different mutations since 1999, and that was the first song I ever worked on. The first two songs I ever worked on that are on the record were 'Deface' and 'Antithesis.' My two oldest.

'Deface' is still my favorite song. Anytime I need to play your music to someone, I'll play that song.

Payne: That's so weird to me, and that's cool, but you don't understand, because everybody says that! I just wonder if I made the other stuff with too much going on. Everybody loves that fucking 'Deface' song, and I am happy with it too, but everyone else in the band hates playing it. I'm happy with that song, but I always get bullshit.

Since the material on Transhuman 2.0 is based on songs from the original album, there is the question of new material. Have any new songs been written that might perhaps be featured on a new album? How would you say the group's songwriting process has changed between the original release of Transhuman and now?

Payne: We've got a shitload of material. I have been working with everybody on new material since the original Transhuman came out two years ago. I think the big problem is that people spend forever on a debut album, and then they rush out a sophomore album, and that's where the sophomore jinx occurs, where it's like, 'Wow, that first record was really fucking cool. This one's a piece of shit.' I've just been spending the last two years feeling out those songs, and to be honest, the best stuff we're making has been during the past six months. One thing that's definitely changed is I'm working with a lot more people now. Before, it used to be either myself solo, or with Drew Rosander. The past six months, I've assembled a lot, and I've realized exactly how to streamline what it is I want to do. I'm working with Jason Prost from MindFluxFuneral a lot. He's my co-producer, and Drew is still working with me, but he's not able to be around as much. Chris Hryniewiecki wrote a lot of the alternate riffs on Transhuman 2.0 and will be writing a lot more on this new album. He and Drew both wrote a lot of 2.0 with me, but before that, Transhuman was totally just me and Drew, or me solo, and towards the end we brought in Brian Blake and he worked on a few songs with us. On this new stuff, I'm able to feature more of the people that I want to feature. I'm able to work with Drew, and I'm able to work with Brian, and I'm able to work with Chris, and I'm able to work with Jason. I'm able to work with all these different people, and that's really helpful because different people keep me interested in different ways. I can write different material with different people.

Chris has been performing live with Cyanotic for a long time, and now he's a full member of the band. How have his contributions affected the sound of Cyanotic?

Payne: Well, I've known Chris for eight years. We were high school weekend drinking buddies. He's been involved with Cyanotic since pretty much the beginning, but he officially came aboard right before we went out on the Transhuman tour in summer 2005. I've been able to work with him just like I do with Drew, where Drew has a certain style of guitar that he puts down on the songs, and now we've just been able to have two different styles of guitars.

Besides Transhuman 2.0, Cyanotic is also featured on two tribute albums this year, one for Chemlab and one for Atari Teenage Riot, and you've done covers and remixes for Chemlab, 16volt, and Acumen Nation in the past, so it's fair to say all of these bands have had a significant impact on you?

Payne: Jesus Christ, yeah! The reason I wanted to start making music was because of all that shit, especially Chemlab, 16volt, and Acumen Nation. That's what was so awesome about working with Jason Novak on Transhuman. Territory=Universe from Acumen Nation was the fifth CD I ever bought. That's a band that stumbled into my life at a really early age. I was 13 and living in Indiana, and I was in a record store, and I said to the guy behind the counter that I liked Nine Inch Nails and White Zombie and Filter, and he said, 'Oh, then check out these guys.' I've listened to them for just a few months less than I've listened to Nine Inch Nails, or any music that wasn't a movie soundtrack. All I used to listen to before was movie scores, like Terminator 2 and Alien3. I'm such a big dork for those movies. I really, truly, honestly, 100% attribute my liking for this music to growing up with movies like Aliens, Predator, and Terminator. I'm not a Star Wars guy, and everybody fucking loves Star Wars, but I never got into it really, even when I was a little kid. All that dystopic sci-fi stuff, that's honestly my bread and butter. When I make music, I try to make a soundtrack to the city in that world, like in the Blade Runner world. One of the coolest things I ever heard anybody say about us was randomly on some message board that I got a link to, 'This sounds like something I'd hear at a club in a sci-fi movie.' And that was one of the biggest compliments I'd ever gotten.

Listening to Transhuman 2.0, the thing I enjoy the most are the Robocop samples.

Payne: 'State of the art bang-bang!' There are so many neat sounds on Robocop. I just went through with my producer one night; we played the movie, and then just pressed record. We recorded 30 random minutes, and I said, 'Alright, take this part, and then that part.' We did that for like 10 movies.

The only thing I like in life more than music is movies. Like I said, I didn't really get into music until I was 13 or 14, and before that all I'd do was movies. I'd won awards for a couple bullshit short films. You know how most people read blogs about news and current events? The only blogs I read are movie blogs. It's the only thing I really care about. I don't read music blogs, I don't care enough about music to read about it, unless it's on Wikipedia or in some old Alternative Press or something, before that 'zine sold itself to indie rock.

Cyanotic also happens to be the name of a metal/grindcore band out of Vancouver. As a result, have you suffered any legal ramifications the way Acumen Nation did early in their career?

Payne: It's two different bands in two different countries. Here's the thing: we're on a record label now, and they haven't made an update since the day Transhuman was released, the original Transhuman. So I don't think it'll be long before it's not even a question, but it sucks because they do have Cyanotic.com. This happened right before we were going to press our first CD. It was 2003, and we were the only band called Cyanotic for a long time, then these guys decide to change their name because the original name, Gravel, was already taken by another band. I don't have the time or the money to care about it, but they haven't had an announcement in like two years, so I don't even worry about it now.

I understand that you recently struck a deal with BitRiot, a subsidiary of WTII Records. How do you feel this deal will benefit Cyanotic?

Payne: I think it's going to benefit us in about 50 different ways. We are with some real brothers in arms, like people I have known for years. Eric Dusik, the label head, has been around since the very beginning of Cyanotic. It's really cool that the label offer came around, because they're going to take a lot of the stress off of me. What with trying to get the CD done, and then the tour, and then other tours...I really want to maximize my productivity because everybody else really wants to get to work on the new stuff, but I haven't had time. I think we have about eight songs for the new album ready to be demoed. I've got to sit down and start really having fun with it, but we're not going to be able to do that until after the tour, but that's cool. We're just going to spend the summer working on and finishing up the next record. Goddammit, we will have it out, if not by the end of this year, then by the beginning of the next.

Another thing that's really cool about this new record deal is that it's unifying a lot of the bands coming up in the Chicago area. Unifying with the BitRiot/WTII guys is just helping everybody get stronger. I think that the USA is totally lacking in new bands. They're all from Europe, or they're all pretending to be from Europe. Not that I don't enjoy some of the Euro stuff, but there could be a lot more variety in the American scene. I want to go back to the '90s style, when there were fewer bands but better music, and this whole scene was so glamorized or bastardized. That's the period that I really love, during the mid '90s. That's when I started coming up in this music, when labels like Recon and WaxTrax! were still releasing stuff, though they all started to trail off after 1996. The '90s were such a cool time, and it's terrible because I feel like an old fart and I'm only 24. Of course, everyone who lived it would probably say, 'Oh, it wasn't that great,' but it's a fuck of a lot better than what we're dealing with now.

With WaxTrax! and Fifth Column Records, at least there was that sense of community.

Payne: It's depressing. These days, there is not a lot of unity. There used to be a unity in this scene, and that's what made it big. That's why hip-hop's big, because every rapper is on like every other fucking rapper's CD. More people learn about more artists that way. With electro and stuff, I don't see many people doing guest appearances on other people's records. I don't see any co-headlining tours. It's just not put together like it used to be, when it was profitable enough to not hold down a day job.

Every genre has got its bullshit points, but I think industrial and metal both have the biggest strengths and the biggest weaknesses. It's the lunkhead separatists that are fucking it up for everybody. I don't know why there's so much separation in this scene. There's the anti-guitars debate and the pro-guitars debate, and I just get tired of it. It's fucking music, it's heavy, it's electronic, that's it. I don't care what instruments people use to make noise. Use a fucking oboe, use a fucking mandolin, make it heavy. I never really understood people having to adhere to just a genre. I think the sub-labeling of industrial music is what broke up the unification. So many stupid little debates about what is synthcore or what is EBM or what is electro or what is angel-dustrial, it's ridiculous. Spend your time doing something more productive.

You mentioned how you laughed when you first heard the term 'hellektro.' Why not just call it terror EBM?

Payne: Why don't they just call it what it really is? 'Spooky Euro dance with goblin vocals and black metal undertones.' In the end, Cyanotic's just another heavy electronic band with a propensity for...

Heavy industrial rock guitars.

Payne: Yeah, I can't run away from that shit; that's what interests me. Mixing the guitars with the drum 'n' bass loops with the noise shit; all that stuff, that's what Cyanotic is. One thing I can always say I'll be happy about with Cyanotic is that we've been able to run the gamut. We try to show as much diversity as possible, because we can't keep making the same songs, like a lot of bands. They're all pretty heavy for the most part, but they're all different, and I've tried to show that we can do mellow shit too.

It's not a friendly scene anymore, but people have been really nice to us, and I'm really surprised that people have been as nice as they have. I enjoy what I do, and it's just because I'm in the thick of it, but when I think that people are listening to it and enjoying it, it's crazy. I don't know what my popularity is. I don't even know how many people know about us. That's why I'm trying to gauge it before we go out on tour. We've done shows for 15 people and we've done shows for 800. It just all depends, and that's why I'm trying to get this tour promoted so much. More than any other tour that we've done, I'm sure that it's going to be awesome, because we have such great people and we're taking a real entertainment approach to the show.

The live show you put on is rather interesting in that each tour seems to have a revolving door lineup, with various other musicians coming in. For example, Jairus Khan of Ad*ver*sary performed with you, although Drew didn't. How is it that the live lineup seems to alternate so frequently and how does it affect the overall sound of Cyanotic?

Payne: The reason I alternate so often is simply because certain people can do it at certain times, and others can't. It never really alters the sound that much, because it's not as if we're a jam band. We've got sequencers and programming. When Jairus came out with us, he was doing some live loops and stuff that were pretty cool. That was pretty interesting, but when Drew came out with us, he'd put on some extra guitar or he would do synths. It never really alternates that much. The only person who puts a lot of different stuff into the songs is Tom Hutchinson from LiD. He just makes up synth stuff on the fly, different melodies and all that. He did that Nine Inch Nails-sounding synth in 'Transhuman 2.0' and the piano in the new '[Paranoid] Disbelief.' That was just him like, 'Here, dude, I came up with this.' 'OK, that's new and different, let's throw that in.' I'm really happy with the lineup we have now, though. I think it's the best one. I wish Drew and Brian would be able to come, but it'd be like fucking Pigface out there with eight people on stage. I think Brian's going to play the first show with us, the Front Line Assembly show. It's kind of interesting, but I guess I've never thought about how much I do alternate the lineup. It's always me and Drew, and Brian, and now Chris, writing. We always write, and Jason Prost is a big asset now.

Did Chris Cozort play on this album?

Payne: Chris laid down some programming for the alternate version we did of 'Axiom' with Eric from 16volt, but we didn't end up using it because we changed the end so drastically. We went all Godflesh at the end. The first one was like a trip-hop song with a Deftones kind of breakdown at the end.

It was awesome to have Eric lay down the vocals, because that was another guy we were listening to 10 years ago, and now he's on our album. That was a big thing for me. He sang the whole fucking thing, and I just reprogrammed the song around him. I was really happy with that Godflesh-style riff that came out of nowhere. The guitar is actually chopped up from a version of 'Order Out of Chaos' that we didn't use. We just stuck it in there because we didn't have any riff to go there, and it worked.

In our last interview, we spoke quite a bit about the equipment the band used in the studio for Transhuman. As the band has had time to develop both in the studio and in the live show, how has your equipment setup changed? What sorts of new tools did you use for Transhuman 2.0?

Sean: I got to tell you that it's not going to be a very interesting answer, because we basically just used the same tools. I've realized that I have a set of a couple of programs that I can work really well, and I have certain methods of how I do it. We used different software and hardware for the new record, but it was nothing dramatic. We did a lot of tracking with Ableton, and it does really have some nice control to it. There are a couple of new software synths that we used, like Massive. I started working more with compressors. One thing I really strayed away from on the new record was trying to do that overly distorted shit on my vocals.

Your vocals sound cleaner on the new record.

Sean: That's one of the major reasons, I think, that I wanted to end up redoing Transhuman. I felt that through all the shows I'd done, that my voice had matured a lot and the guitars had matured a lot, and the percussion had matured. Everything just matured naturally. Now that I think about it, now I've figured out why we really did Transhuman 2.0, because we worked with so many alternating people on those fucking tours that eventually we established our definite sound. We realized our strengths. On a lot of the first Transhuman, that was my first time yelling, my first time saying, 'OK, I guess I'll take a Xanax and think about things that make me angry, and then yell into a microphone.' When we started doing shows, we'd bring out processors, and they'd always give me fucking problems like feedback, and we'd think, 'Oh, that sounds like ass,' so about a year ago, I thought, 'Fuck processing!' That's definitely a big reason I wanted to redo Transhuman, because I just think we attacked a lot of things better, and the vocals were one of them.

That was the first thing that stood out to me, and I think it's a major improvement.

Sean: I wanted to show people what we're capable of now. The focus really is on the new stuff. It's just a really matured version of Transhuman, from everything that we learned from Novak and all of the people that we've worked with in the past on the tours.

It sucks that we have to have meaningless jobs, doesn't it? If everybody was just able to do this and nothing else, I would always be in a total state of glee. It's just one thing about life, and I wish this could just be my life. When we go out on tour, we're able to achieve that spark that makes us keep going. We're addicted to it! It's just so fun to meet people that are like-minded and like us.