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An Interview with Summer Bowman and Roger Fracé of The Machine in the Garden
Posted: Sunday, March 16, 2008
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

For any band to last longer than a decade is an achievement in itself, and for the darkwave duo of Summer Bowman and Roger Fracé, collectively known as The Machine in the Garden, they've celebrated their longevity with the XV album. Compiling several remixes, rarities, and two new songs, the band demonstrates their enticing mix of ethereal melodies, atmospheric guitars and electronics, topped off by Bowman's soaring vocals, putting them on par with contemporaries such as Faith and the Muse, Mephisto Walz, and The Azoic. Beginning in the early '90s as a solo endeavor for Fracé, the band first came into the scene with the Veils and Shadows EP in 1994. Bowman joined soon after, and the duo released their full-length debut Underworld on their own Deus Ex Musica imprint, which caught the attention of Middle Pillar Presents. They would over the course of the following eight years produce four albums under the label, as well as contributing to numerous compilations and playing a handful of shows as their popularity in the gothic/darkwave underground grew. In 2003, Bowman formed Mirabilis with Dru Allen of This Ascension, presenting a departure from the more electronic sounds of The Machine in the Garden toward something more vocal-oriented, though her collaboration with Fracé would continue even into this project. Now free from their contract and having restarted the Deus Ex Musica label for the release of XV, Bowman and Fracé discuss with ReGen what the future holds for them, touching on subjects such as their live show, their longstanding relationship with Middle Pillar Presents, Fracé's one time collaboration with The Claypeople, and the pros and cons of making music in the digital age.

Your latest release is the 15th anniversary collection, and of the two new songs, in the notes for 'Mental Wasteland,' you mention that you were trying to get back to the roots of the band's sound and what your guitar style is about. How has your guitar style changed over the years that you had to get back with this song?

Fracé: Part of it was a response to the loop-driven nature of Shadow Puppets and moving a little bit more away from that. The comment about 'getting back to the roots' has sort of turned into the 'when in doubt, add more distortion' idea that seems to have permeated everything. When I go back and think about something like the Veils and Shadows EP and songs like 'A Touch of Heaven' and 'CryGods,' the distortion pedal that I was using back then was pretty much always on max. A couple of years later, it's evident on something like 'Oblician,' and around Asphodel, I went into a little bit of a different direction going for something that in some cases could be mistaken for an E-bow. A lot of that influence comes from listening to stuff like Mephisto Walz and Autumn, that smoother, more chorus-heavy sound, so I kind of wanted to turn it around and go back to something a little more grungy, bluesy, or more punk.

The Machine in the Garden did originally start as just you, and Summer didn't come on until the Underworld release. Now that Summer has Mirabilis with Dru Allen, what other projects do you have going on?

Fracé: I don't have any. In some ways, I provided technical support and an extra set of ears for Mirabilis when they requested it. I did both of the remixes for them, so I'm not completely removed from that project, and when Dru comes over to record, I'll hang out in the kitchen and make something chocolate for them.

Has it ever been a consideration to go solo with something completely different from The Machine in the Garden?

Bowman: You should talk about what you did with Dan Neet.

Fracé: I did almost have another side project back in the mid '90s with a band called The Claypeople. There's a song on Shadow Puppets called 'Spider's Bride,' which was actually a song that I wrote with Dan, so that was originally part of that side project. There were a couple of other songs that we were playing with that were very synth-based, like how 'Spider's Bride' fits onto Shadow Puppets, because that was a very loop and synth-driven album anyway. That's pretty much the only side project I've ever started working with. Back in the early '90s, there were a couple of times when I met up with some other musicians and we'd have little jam sessions and stuff, but that was really about it. Everything that I write, Summer just does wonderful things with vocals on, so I don't really need to look anywhere else.

Bowman: Didn't Dan recently contact you on MySpace to ask if you maybe wanted to do something again?

Fracé: Did he? Yeah.

That's interesting, since The Claypeople are more of a grungy industrial rock band; it's a little removed from what people would associate with The Machine in the Garden.

Fracé: There are certainly some songs in the early '90s that I wrote that had some Claypeople influence in them and were much more industrial and guitar-driven, but it's just that I've never released them.

Also in the liners for 'Ex Oblivione,' it mentions that the song was originally meant for an H.P. Lovecraft tribute that never happened. How much of an influence has Lovecraft's writings had on some of the themes you've explored lyrically?

Bowman: That song is the only song that I've ever explored Lovecraft's writings. I've explored other writings in other songs and have had a lot of different influences, but that song is the only one with a Lovecraft influence. It's just because we heard about this compilation that I don't think ever happened at all, and we thought, 'Oh, well, why don't we contribute a song?' That specific short story spoke to me, so I wrote my lyrics based on that. It was a long time ago, and we recorded it right after Underworld. It was probably one of the first things we recorded after Underworld, if not the first.

The Machine in the Garden is no longer on Middle Pillar Presents. How has your work with that label been of benefit to the band? What were the pros and cons of that relationship?

Bowman: We had good times, and we had difficult times. It's like any relationship with anyone you work closely with. You don't always see eye to eye, and you try to get out the best product that you can. I think in some ways, they pushed us to release a better product, a better CD. And then in some ways, we didn't always agree with the decisions that they made, mostly artistically with regards to things that they wanted changed, usually songs like 'Six Days.' Just about every review we've ever read always says, 'I don't understand why this song wasn't on the album,' which is funny because that song was cut from One Winter's Night, not necessarily with our blessing. We really like them as people, and I still talk to Kevin regularly. Obviously, we still have to work together in some capacity; Mirabilis was a joint release between Middle Pillar and Projekt, so we still work with them in that regard, but Mirabilis is on a separate contract with Middle Pillar, too. Our relationship really started when they started carrying Underworld, and that was just distribution, and Kevin came to me and said, 'We really actually want this on our label, and we want you guys.' That was really interesting.

Fracé: We were on that compilation first, too.

Bowman: They asked us to sit in on a compilation, and they just loved the song that we submitted, which was 'What is Eternal?' and they asked us to follow it up with an album. So we were actually one the first bands signed to Middle Pillar. We released the two albums, One Winter's Night and Out of the Mists, and right after that one, we played CMJ in New York, and we immediately signed another contract with them, and that's when we did Asphodel and Shadow Puppets. We had a two-album deal with them, which we fulfilled. We asked them if they were interested in XV, but they weren't really in a position to release something like that right now, so we decided to resurrect our label from Underworld and do it ourselves. It's so much easier now with all the digital stuff and the Internet being so much bigger than it was when we did Underworld. We fulfilled mail orders through catalogs with checks back then, so it was very different. And of course, now Underworld is out of print and only available digitally.

Fracé: That is another strength of distribution: advertising, contacts, all of the stuff that we had to deal with when we did Underworld, and we were just really happy to be handing it off to someone else, because it was a pain in the butt. Now, it's just the inverse doing it ourselves again.

Bowman: Yeah, I forgot how much work it was. Middle Pillar always did such a great job with advertising and promoting us and getting us out there. We've always appreciated that.

You mentioned resurrecting Deus Ex Musica. What are your further plans for the label? Do you plan to release the next Machine in the Garden album yourselves?

Bowman: We haven't actually thought that far ahead, to be honest. I don't know if we want to try to find a different label or do it ourselves. We don't really know.

Fracé: We'll think about that when it becomes the time.

Bowman: It's better to have the album in hand if you're going to shop it to another label, so I imagine that once we have an album in hand, we can make the decision from there on what to do with it. But we just got done with this, and Mirabilis just got finished, so it's kind of time for a little break.

With the two new songs on XV, how do you feel these songs are indicative of where you might go musically with your next set of music?

Fracé: It may or may not be. It seems that with every album that we sit down and write, everything comes together in a certain way. As diverse as the songs are, there's still something cohesive about them; it could be a particular guitar sound I pick, and in the case of Shadow Puppets, it was loop and electronic-based, and that's how that album held together. Even the new songs on XV are pretty different. We had a lot of really positive feedback about 'Otherworld,' about it being more of a classical goth sound, and that might be a direction to explore in the next round.

Bowman: It's really pretty organic. Pretty much everything I write now goes into the Mirabilis bucket, so Roger will come up with something musically, and however I feel vocally and stylistically will go with it, and we just go from there.

Having been at this for 15 years, as the band has, how has your vocal approach changed? Now especially with Mirabilis, which is more vocal-based, how would you say you've approached it differently?

Bowman: I definitely feel a lot stronger and a lot more at home with my voice. When we recorded Underworld, I was 21—20 when we recorded some of those songs, I guess. My voice hadn't grown still into its own, and I didn't necessarily know the range I could use it in, or even using it more as an instrument to make different kinds of sounds and noises and things I could do with it. I think I've grown a lot in that regard. Mirabilis has helped a lot, because Dru and I push each other in new ways vocally. I never thought of the different things I could do with my voice until Dru pushed me in a certain way. On 'World Indifferent,' I wrote all the music, and Dru wrote all the vocal melody and the words, and we came up with the idea that I would sing that counterpoint on the chorus with her. She asked me to sing in a way I'd never sung before, that I never would have done on my own, but it came up so interesting-sounding that it's a sound I'd like to cull in the future. That's happened a lot, and I just feel more comfortable in my voice and where I can take it. In terms of lyrics, I still pull from the same inspiration. I'd like to think my lyrics are more mature than those of a 20-year-old. I'm still inspired by arts, visuals, theatre, movies, other music, life experiences, and a variety of different things. With 'Otherworld,' I was inspired by some books, and with 'Mental Wasteland,' I was inspired by a game. Different things will pull off a spark, and then I'll just go off from there; it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the original thing. With 'Mental Wasteland,' it ended up going off in a different direction and wasn't necessarily about the same thing anymore, while with 'Otherworld,' it became more about that which inspired it.

Out of curiosity, what game is 'Mental Wasteland' based on?

Bowman: It's based on this zombie online game, like a text-based game.

Roger, you've contributed your vocals to some of the songs. How would you say you've changed as a singer over time?

Fracé: Singing-wise, I think I've definitely matured and gotten better over the years. Just thinking of the stuff that I thought were really good vocal performances like 'Walls,' now I listen to it and think I could sing that a lot better these days. There's a huge difference there, and I think just lyrically, what Summer does has pushed me so that when I do write words, I try to write things that are more interesting. I don't have the same direct influences that she does, but I usually have to be inspired by the music, and I may hear like one line and then twist it in my own head and write something based on that. That's the case in the lyrics to 'Voice,' because I have no idea what that song means.

Performing live as a two-piece, what sort of considerations come into play when transferring your music to a live environment? With each show, how do you try to improve it and make it more interesting?

Fracé: One of the limitations of being a two-piece band is there are a lot less random factors that come into play. In general, I play guitar and Summer sings, which means that everything else is coming from a different source; in our case, it's a CD. For the most part, the backing tracks are made from the same ProTools or Logic files as the original song, so in that sense, a lot of the live material isn't really that different, because it came from the same source. There are some cases where we maybe made the backing track before the final mix, like the live version of 'Control' is a little different from the CD version. One or two shows ago, we had a request to do our Cocteau Twins cover live, and we'd done that a long time ago so we didn't have a backing track for that, so we had to recreate and re-tweak it a little bit, so that sounds different. From a guitar perspective, I have to decide what I'm going to do and which parts I'm going to play and which parts are part of the backing track.

Bowman: We tried to perform with two guitars once before, and that was kind of interesting. And depending on how close to home we are, if we don't have to fly anywhere, we can take additional equipment along. We have a live hammered dulcimer or a keyboard. It depends on how close to home we are and how much equipment we can take, so we can mix things up a bit, and that's kind of fun because we like to change things and get away from the CD a little bit. And sometimes we've done songs that are just acoustic guitar, and when we have the unexpected encore, we usually have to improvise and figure things out.

Has it ever been a consideration to get a live band?

Fracé: If we played more live shows, it would be interesting. Back in the mid '90s, I recruited another guitarist to have a little more presence on stage, and I think we only ever did one show with him. In that regard, I feel really bad, and we really don't play out that much. We're not a big touring band. We're more of a playing special occasions kind of band.

Bowman: Yeah, it's just not fair. It's not fair to make somebody learn all of these songs, and we've talked about things that would be cool like to have someone playing MIDI pads, like a drummer playing pads on stage, or maybe some keyboards. Something like that would be way fun and great, but we'd have to do a major tour in order to do that. We would have to do the whole summer tour in order to make that fair for the people who would be learning all those songs. Not to mention that we'd have to pay them, and touring costs a lot of money, so just with the two of us a couple of years ago, we were basically just trying to break even. This is often a money-losing venture or a break-even type of venture. The purpose is to promote yourself and get yourself out there. The first show that you do in a city may have 15 or 20 people, and the next time you come through a year later, you might have 100 people. Come back a couple of years later, and you have 200. You just have to keep building up in certain areas. We have a pretty good presence here in Austin, and we were doing okay when we were in Denver, we'd built up some fans. We left and came back a year later, and suddenly we were like superstars, and there were like a million people at our show. You have to play, leave, come back, and play again, and keep revisiting. It's all about promotion; it's really not to make a buck. It's about getting your album out there and selling CDs to people and turning them onto your music so that they'll buy your CDs in the future.

What drove the decision to make XV a collection of remixes and rarities rather than a straightforward 'greatest hits' collection?

Bowman: Because nowadays, all of our songs are available on iTunes in digital format. If you wanted to, you could go pick all of your favorite songs by The Machine in the Garden for $0.99 each, buy them, and have your own greatest hits album. We don't have hits, like number one hits, like most Top 40 bands. What would we collect? How would we choose?

Fracé: Plus, most fans already have all of the CDs already, so if we just did a 'greatest hits,' they'd think, 'Oh, well, I already own all these.'

Bowman: We thought it would be a lot more fun, because we have all this material that didn't make it on albums. We had some remixes that people did, and we asked some people to do new remixes, and we thought it would be great to have a couple of new songs on there. The only thing that's missing is a live track. We did have a live recording that we were hoping would come out, but it didn't work out. Voltaire got a good recording that night and released a live album. I think we were louder than Voltaire, so that's probably why it didn't work out. It would've been great, but we couldn't get anything good that night, and like we were saying before, because our live versions are so close to the album version, it would sound like the album version except for us missing a couple of notes and people in the background.

One of the new remixes on XV was done by Ego Likeness, and as you mention in the liner notes, they do have similarities to The Machine in the Garden. What are your thoughts on the new crop of bands coming that are following the example of bands like The Machine in the Garden, Faith and the Muse, and Mephisto Walz?

Bowman: I really hope that things are shifting back to more of a 'goth' focus. Certainly, the EBM and danceable industrial stuff has its place, but obviously I prefer bands like Faith and the Muse. I kind of hope that we see a little bit of a shift back in that direction, and everything's pretty cyclical, so I think we're going to see some things happening. I'm always on the lookout for new and interesting music, and lately I've been finding it mostly outside of the goth scene, like Imogen Heap. She's just a really unique musician. She uses her voice in incredible ways, and she does really interesting things with loops and electronics, and she's just a really interesting and creative force. She's a little bit out there, like, 'woohoo,' but she's really talented and creating music that you can't categorize in any way. That's always interesting to me.

Fracé: I've actually gotten a bit static with my music. Summer is definitely more the one to shop around and find new music than I am. I am tending to find in my CD collection, 'Oh, here's my favorite band,' or 'Oh, there's this bigger band that has something new coming out.' I'm not being as experimental now as I used to be.

Bowman: Roger also tends to find things in his collection that are old that he rediscovers that he goes back and revisits.

Fracé: Take something like a band like Joy Division, who has been a huge influence to me pre-Machine in the Garden, and coming back and picking up their stuff again recently. I read something about their albums getting re-mastered and re-released. I found that I already have the re-masters, because I have that box set that came out a few years ago. But that's kind of what I've been doing, digging back in some of my old influences. I keep having this desire to get back into roots, and somehow it's never quite happened the way that I plan it to, but it's one of those things where I go into the studio and see what comes out of my brain. I go in wanting to do one thing, and something completely different comes out.