Oops!

It looks like you don't have flash player 6 installed. Click here to go to Macromedia download page.

An Interview with Jared Louche of Chemlab
Posted: Sunday, January 20, 2008
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

At the beginning of the '90s, a new form of underground music was taking over the clubs, driven by programmed rhythms as hard as jackhammers, guitars that grated the speakers like sandpaper across an electrical field, and synthesizers that seared like a flamethrower, infusing all the best elements of rock, punk, and industrial. Machine rock, or coldwave as it came to be popularly known, was the next big thing, not only assaulting fans of the underground music scene, but even making its dents in the mainstream. One of the first and most well-known bands of this style of music was Chemlab. From their meager beginnings in 1990 with the 10 Ton Pressure EP to their much-lauded full-length debut Burnout at the Hydrogen Bar to the sonically diverse East Side Militia, the duo of Jared Louche and Dylan Thomas More created a sound that was both raw and raucous, drawing from originators like Ministry and KMFDM while pushing for a new sound that would define the style for years to come. Falling prey to the pressures of the industry, including the collapse of Fifth Colvmn Records and a waning interest in industrial music as well as internal problems, More and Louche parted ways, effectively ending Chemlab, although the band would see its music re-released on Invisible Records from 2000 on. Following that were a series of side projects featuring Louche's intricate and mind-altering vocal constructions that have drawn comparisons to the likes of William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson and Timothy Leary, as well as appearances with Pigface. In 2004, Louche revived the Chemlab moniker with Oxidizer, recorded and produced with members of Acumen Nation and featuring a plethora of other guests. The Rock Whore vs. Dance Floor remix album followed almost two years later, as did a series of one-off live shows that culminated in 2007's Detonation Days tour alongside U.S.S.A., Skeleton Key, and Cyanotic on select dates. With the new wave of industrial and machine rock going strong, there is no better time for Chemlab to reintroduce itself into the veins of an audience high on adrenaline-fueled coldwave. The noise poet speaks to us on his current itinerary of projects with members of Dead Voices on Air, Cyanotic and Caustic, while touching on Chemlab's place in history and just what the future looks like.

Chemlab recently finished the Detonation Days tour, the band's first tour in eight years.

Louche: A decade, actually.

How would you say the tour went compared to some of the past tours you've done?

Louche: Oh, really well. It was something of an experiment to see if we could take off 10 years from the road and come back and still have an audience that is actually going to not only buy the records, but come to the shows and buy the merchandise and support it all the way around. That's something we discovered that we in fact do have. It's pretty amazing to me, and I was certainly concerned that our tour would be viewed in hindsight and in the final analysis when it was all done as being hubris, because it would've been a complete and utter financial failure as well as an attendance failure. I was pleased to be proven wrong. I think the way that I view it overall is that it wasn't as good as I had hoped, but it was not nearly as bad as I had feared, so for the first tour in 10 years with absolutely zero label support, it was pretty damn good.

Talking about label support, the past Chemlab records have been re-released on Invisible/Underground, Inc., as was the comeback album Oxidizer. What is your relationship with that label like now?

Louche: I believe that the last record with them will be the Altered Statesmen record that Mark Spybey and I finished about a year ago.

You did release a track on the Hydrogen Bar web site that you'd done with Spybey and Robin Storey. Is that track actually from that project?

Louche: Yes, it is, and there's also a MySpace page for Altered Statesmen at www.myspace.com/alteredstatesmenband. That will be the last record with Invisible, and then we'll see what happens after that. I don't know what happens after that, but I'm quite disillusioned with record labels in general and have been for quite some time. I ran one, and if there was anything to keep me from being disillusioned... The record industry is an extremely unpleasant business full of scumbags and assholes.

On the note of Altered Statesmen, you're working with Mark Spybey of Dead Voices on Air, and his style of music is certainly more abstract than a great deal of what you've done in the past. How does your approach to working with them differ from some of the other projects you've done, such as Pigface and H3llb3nt, that have been somewhat more conventional?

Louche: Well, with Pigface, I've had nothing to do with the writing of any of it, because Martin had always said, 'Yes, yes, I want you involved in the writing,' and then never has involved me, so there. This record was actually going to be something completely different to what it finally evolved into. When I first got in touch with Mark, my main thrust was to work with him on creating a collection of soundtracks for a handful of stories and broken word pieces that I had that, to me, needed soundtracks. They had a very cinematographic feel to them, and so he was certainly very interested in the idea. We got together about six months after we started to talk about what we were doing or what we would do, and I brought up a collection of my writing and went into his studio. But what was interesting was that it felt like the music dictated its own terms very quickly. The first piece that we did, I recorded a broken word piece, and then we developed some soundtracks for it. The second one that we did, I started reading, but I actually started reading while he was developing some strange looped noises in the background. I started reading on top of it, and he recorded that, and then mutated the loops as we went, and that then required that I edit on the fly. As I edited on the fly, he edited the sound on the fly, all of this while we were recording. After seven minutes, it came to its natural conclusion, and we decided that that piece was done. That then meant that this is a new way that we were approaching the work. So, the next one we did, he created a basic song structure/soundtrack/bed, and he spent an hour or two on it. While he did that, I did some quick editing to a piece that I thought would work well in reference to what I was hearing, so again, he and I were both doing some quick editing right off the cuff. After an hour or two, he said that he felt he had something that would work, and did I have something that would fit in with it. By that point, I did, and I'd done some quick nip/tucks to a piece of mine, an older piece that I actually updated and mutated. I recorded it, but not as a straight reading, nor was it straight singing; it was a mixture of the two. The music and the words took on a new shape. It was no longer soundtracks for preset stories. It was stories that were evolving in reference to the music I was hearing, and the music would then evolve once the story had been created, and it became this very organic give-and-take trade-off that we were doing. It became an actual album of semi-song structures that are delicately apocalyptic and very beautiful in a naked and scarred sort of way, attractive yet repellent in equal measure. It's not a Chemlab record by any stretch of the imagination, nor does it fit into the canon of records that people know me by, yet it certainly fits in with some of the things that I did with a handful of different projects during the '80s: a band called Furnace, for example. But my fan base doesn't know that, and people that are involved in the music scene that know me at all haven't heard this side of me. It's not rhythm-based, it's not syncopated, it's got very little verse/chorus structure, it's not the aggressive full-bore noise of Zoviet France or my irritant migraine full-bore hate project called Peach of Immortality. I've been describing it as Nick Drake being fisted by Coil. And some people say, 'Oh, Nick Drake. Who's Coil?' and some people say, 'Oh Coil. Who's Nick Drake?' So the people who like Coil will either be turned on or turned off by the Nick Drake aspect, and people who like Nick Drake will definitely run to the high hills from the Coil aspects of it. Honestly, as is now very much the case with me and the way that I feel about releasing records, I don't care. People will either get it or not.

So it's more about getting the work out there for people to hear and to let them make their own judgments?

Louche: Yeah, the main thrust for me is not audience satisfaction. I mean, it isn't as if I'm doing stuff just to piss them off, but I'm also not creating music that is built with them and their enjoyment at the forefront of my mind; it's built for me. Hopefully, if I create something that I really like, then my fans will get it and come along for the ride. As with Covergirl, some people will absolutely hate it, and some people who haven't been interested in it before will become interested. There will be some people who discover me through this who will only like Altered Statesmen and turn up their noses at Chemlab and H3llb3nt and all the rest of it. Honestly, again...whatever. I find I'm in a position where I don't have to worry about mining a particular vein. I don't have to worry about duplicating a particular success over and over again, because I've never had one. I think the closest would be the songs off of Burnout, but there are no quantifiable pop songs on there, and there are absolutely no hits on there in terms of hits that one understands in the traditional context of SoundScan, Billboard, blah, blah, blah. There just aren't. I don't have the fan base that would support that sort of thing. I'm not known beyond the realm of the cult underground. Don't get me wrong, I love being a cult underground figure, but one of the things I like about being a cult underground figure is that I have the freedom to do what I like.

During the '90s when Chemlab was at its most active, that was a time when in the mainstream, industrial music was getting attention, and bands like Gravity Kills, Filter, and Machines of Loving Grace were being given a lot of attention. And that was when the coldwave scene was at its peak, so its interesting to think that you've never had hits in the same regard as what would be played on the radio. On that note, as far as Chemlab is concerned, since it has been your first tour in a decade, and it has been three years since Oxidizer and one and a half years since the Rock Whore remix record, what is the future of Chemlab looking like?

Louche: The future looks like a pretty, shaven 16-year-old. [Laughs.]

Well, everybody wants to know. I've been cagey with my responses. Will there be another Chemlab record? I think the answer there is maybe, a very strong maybe. There are a number of projects that are taking precedence right now, such as Altered Statesmen. I have to get that out! That is a record that I'm really proud of, and it's certainly pushed me to go beyond the parameters of my normal tool usage of throat, brain and pen. There's nothing better than a stimulating creative challenge. Working with Mark definitely was that, and he and I come from the same sort of intellectual creative mindset, the idea of Thelonius Monk playing between the notes, or the idea of Eno playing to fill the holes and understanding the importance of leaving the holes as holes, all of which are not traditional rock 'n' roll concepts or traditional ways of writing rock 'n' roll songs.

Eno has certainly never been traditional. On the subject of other projects, during the tour, Sean Payne from Cyanotic had mentioned that you had a new project in the works with him and Matt Fanale from Caustic. What are the specifics on that project?

Louche: It actually started with e-mails from me to Matt. We met at the Blacksun Festival last year, and we started correspondence. It turns out that we're very much on the same page in terms of some of our rock 'n' roll interests, and we started talking about working on a record together, and he sent some loops over to me. I then took them into the studio with a friend of mine, Marc Plastic, and Plastic and I have been hacking away at these loops and building very strange songs out of them that will then get sent to Sean for him to play around with and for Matt to play around with more, and then sent back again to us to work on some finishing touches, and then sent back to them to do final production on. When that's going to come out, or what it's going to be called, I have no idea. But that's definitely one of the projects that will take my attention this year. Because of my involvement, of course, it absolutely can't function within the predictable terms of Caustic, Cyanotic or Chemlab. That's not to say that there won't be aspects of Caustic, Cyanotic or Chemlab in there, but it's going to push all of the participants to do more than just the usual presets that we do with our regular bands. Not to say that our regular bands don't take chances, but because this is not our regular band, we can function in different ways and be less concerned about, again, fan base satisfaction, and just do something that we want to do to push the parameters.

I keep sounding like I'm anti-fan base. I'm absolutely not. I'm actually really lucky because I have a fan base that the longer I can put out music, the more they're willing to put aside all of their preconceptions, and put aside all of their closed-mindedness, and put aside all of their unwillingness to just blindly leap into the unknown, and leap blindly more and more into the unknown with me. I feel strongly supported by my fan base, so the idea to do things without them in mind isn't a negative statement; it actually is born out of the feeling that I am so well-supported by them and that I am understood by them. I feel like I'm an artist that is allowed a great deal of freedom to just experiment, and that the fan base will be there because they're intelligent enough to be willing to actually let the artist do what he wants to do. Even if Chemlab were still Jared and Dylan as it was from day one, we wouldn't be making Burnout Part Three, Part Four, or Part Five. In Chemlab's original career, there was never a Burnout Part Two. East Side Militia came along and was at least 50 percent radically different, which was already setting people up, whether they knew it or not, to get ready for consistent change and mutation. The artist to me is not an interesting artist if the artist isn't shifting all the time and trying new things and attempting new things and succeeding and failing, but all the time growing.

I think one of the things that I was really lucky with working with Dylan in a whole ocean of unlucky things...one of the things I was lucky with was the fact that he was willing to take as many chances as I was about what we were writing, how we were writing it, and the direction that we were taking. We were both very clear that we didn't want to do Burnout Part Two. We didn't. If we were talking about superficial plastic business decisions and creating a replicant, well OK, Burnout Part Two is what it was all about, and this time we would make it replicant version 2.0, where we would actually have the quantifiable hit-based pop songs on it. We would take it in that direction and be mercenary about it and completely and utterly sublimate all of our creative needs, urges, hungers, and desires to the higher interest of simply prostituting it for money. It turns out that neither he or I were able or even interested in doing that.

You have been living in London for a good number of years, and touring in the USA is becoming extremely difficult in this day and age for European-based bands. Did that sort of situation play into the recent tour?

Louche: Well, it wasn't really a factor because all of the members are American. Wade Alin from Christ Analogue is based in Chicago. Jason Bazinet, the drummer, from SMP, is based in Seattle. Gabriel Shaw on guitar and Jim McAndrew on bass are both based in Boston. I happen to live in London, but I'm an American citizen, so it's simply a matter of me getting back into the country. What's interesting is that all of the tours that we did originally were all tours that were not based on good business decisions for the headliners. They just wanted us to come out because they like the music. If we were on the last tour making solid business decisions, I'm not sure we would've gone out with either U.S.S.A. or Skeleton Key. Honestly, if it had been a really sensible business decision, we wouldn't have gone out as headliner at all. We would've gone out to somebody else's show and tried to steal their crowd. Some bands are taking no creative chances or challenges whatsoever, absolutely none. Fine! More power to them if they've figured out a way to make money in an industry that is very difficult to make money in. Part of that is because they're interested in bands that are solid business propositions such as building a new bridge to connect two unconnected towns on opposite sides of the Mississippi. It hasn't got anything to do with passion, with sweat, with sex, with glory, with rock 'n' roll. It's all about whether or not it makes sense to buy a loft in the World Trade Center district when there's rebuilding going on. Yes, of course it does. You can get the land cheap and sell it for more later on. It's a business decision, but it's got nothing to do with creativity.

On that note, since you are working with members of the newer generation, Caustic and Cyanotic, and them carrying on the type of music that Chemlab was known for, what are your thoughts on the newer generation and how has it affected your mindset?

Louche: For me, bands like Caustic and Cyanotic are doing some really, really interesting work. I feel like with both of those bands and a handful of others, that they are only just now beginning to come into their own, and that their next records will be the ones to watch. I think Caustic's next record after Booze Up and Riot will be...he's at a position where he feels much the way that I do, where he's entrenched enough, balanced enough, and supported enough to not care about whether or not he can sometimes go out on a limb and take a really insane chance. If he feels like it's a creatively valid chance, then he's going to go and take it. I think it's a question of whether or not you have a sense of humor about your career and the art that you make. If you have a sense of humor about it, then you care a little bit less about whether or not people initially laugh at what you're doing. People initially laughed at Covergirl. A lot of them did, and believe me, I have the anti-sales numbers to bear out that statement. That was a tax write-off. It was a record that I did for me, and I loved parts of it, like all my records, and hated parts of it, but it's not a record that I did because it was a good business decision. I have a sense of humor about my career and who I am and my standing and my importance, self-importance, or non-importance; otherwise, I never would've done a jazz version of a Chemlab song. You've got to be able to have a certain amount of self-deprecating humor there, and a certain amount of 'nobody can laugh at me harder than I can laugh at myself.' There's great strength in that, and Matt definitely has that. Contained within that, there is the strength to take chances that other artists would not, because it doesn't fit in with what they've done, because it pushes too far out, because it asks too many unanswerable questions. That's where I think Matt is heading. I think Cyanotic is heading there, but not for another two records. The next record, the one that they're working on now, I'm very interested in hearing.

Often, what happens is as bands, our first record or two...they are the records that most mirror our influences, inevitably. 'Man, I want to get a band together because The Stooges are so damn cool,' and inevitably you're going to sound like The Stooges. This is a generalized statement, but by your third record, you've toured, you've put stuff out, you've listened to more things, you've matured or you've denatured, and you're willing if you are actually an artist to take chances, and you're hungry to evolve and to shift, to do different things outside of the norm, the norm that is defined by what your career is. Once again, I was lucky that Dylan and I both did our Ministry/Nine Inch Nails record, which is Burnout, and we enjoyed it immensely. It's leavened with a handful of self-deprecating jokes about 'Oh my god, look at all of our influences' that very few people ever got but that he and I knew were there, and that was great. When we came to the second record, East Side was very different. The influences were much less obvious. Had we stayed together, we were talking about the possibility of doing a project that would rewrite the Blade Runner soundtrack and completely update it.

One of your most well known projects in the past that hasn't been active for awhile is H3llb3nt, with Eric Powell of 16volt and Bryan Black of Haloblack and MOTOR. Is there any talk of pursuing another H3llb3nt record?

Louche: There's always talk of it, but I don't know if it's going to happen or not. Bryan is very busy with MOTOR, and that's doing extremely well in the hard, demented rock/techno world, and he seems to be happy at Mute, and he's doing a lot of remix work, which is great. He's labored in the shadows for a long time, so it's pretty important that he get out there with this project and get exposed as much as he can. Eric's busy with 16volt, and I'm busy with a million projects. Of course, we bounce the e-mails around periodically and try to find out what each other's availability is, but I don't think I see another H3llb3nt record for at least another year. At least. I've got the Altered Statesmen record that's about to come out, and Mark and I are talking about more recording. There's the project with Matt and Sean. There's Wade Alin and I talking about doing another Jared Louche and the Aliens record. The first one was meant as a one-off with a handful of different people, but this one's going to be more of an actual record, with fewer covers and more songs that we've written.

Was there anything else that you wanted to add for our readers?

Louche: I'm just enjoying relaxing after the tour, and being back in the arms of family, enjoying looking forward to future projects, and the idea of future tours, getting busy in the studio, and my actual work, which is fascinating stuff.