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An Interview with Sean Payne, Chris Hryniewiecki, and Eris of Cyanotic
Posted: Sunday, July 27, 2008
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

Cyanotic is perhaps the best example of a modern band in a modern age; besides their incorporation of various genres into an amalgam of drum 'n bass, metal, and hardcore industrial rock, the band has unapologetically embraced the digital media and online distribution to reach a wider audience. Producing a futuristic sound with distinct influences from the most innovative music of the past, Sean Payne has led this raucous collective down five years of touring, sharing the stage with the new generation of industrial, as well as joining a number of their heroes, culminating in their appearance on 16volt's 2008 Denial Highway tour. With their past releases—the Mutual Bonding Through Violation EP and the Transhuman and Transhuman 2.0 albums—selling remarkably well in an underground market prone to Internet piracy and outright complacency, the band established their own Glitch Mode Squad brand, signed to WTII Records subsidiary Bit Riot, and have now released the Gears Gone Wild compilation, featuring some of the hardest-hitting and most forward-thinking industrial and drum 'n bass acts in the scene today. Hard at work on their new album and performing alongside machine rock legends like 16volt, Sean Payne, guitarist Chris Hryniewiecki, and drummer Eris took some time after the show in Philadelphia, PA to clue ReGen in on the goings on of the Glitch Mode Squad, from a plethora of new side projects, an introduction to the new lineup, which may very well prove to be the most productive of Cyanotic's history yet, and just a little info on the upcoming new album, appropriately titled The Medication Generation.

Cyanotic has toured with a lot of bands that have been big influences to you, and you've stated that 16volt was the last of your favorites to tour with.

Payne: Yeah, I don't know what we're going to do after this. What are we going to go do? I'm not going to just go and kill myself to go playing with some flash-in-the-pan sub-genre of EBM band that sings trite lyrics about genocide.

So what do you think you can do to top this?

Hryniewiecki: Well, headlining completely.

Payne: We're going to try headlining again. We're going to do a Canadian tour in the fall, and it's tentatively going to be with Memmaker, and opening all of that will be the new project that I'm working on, Ondroid with our new keyboardist Ondrea.

On that note, Cyanotic does have some new members, such as Ondrea and Eris of Born into Oblivion. How did they happen to join the band?

Payne: Well, strangely enough, Eris and I toured together on the Hail the Glitch tour, which was well-documented as a huge failure in the Martin Atkins tour book. We got a lot of flak from that book, telling us we didn't do this right or we didn't that right. Basically, we just didn't sign to Invisible, and so Martin Atkins screwed me. We met because we had toured together with the band that he was in before playing guitar. We weren't really big fans of them, but we liked this dude off the bat because he seemed like he didn't write any of that music and he was just there to go out and have a good time. We established a bond, and that was two years ago. I feel that with this, Cyanotic has been in existence as a touring entity for five years, and the only consecutive members on every tour except the very first have been Chris and I. It's always kind of sucked, because I'm always pulling people in, and it depends on who is available, who can get time off of work, or who is in school. But now I feel like I've finally found a definitive lineup. I really do! I feel really strongly about it. With Ondrea as the little center of the storm that doesn't move around too much and is surrounded by varying degrees of male ugliness, it's nice to have someone who isn't so goddamn ugly and angry on stage. And then we have Eris, who is perhaps the best percussionist we've worked with. I love Adrian White, but this guy's down. He's not getting shit out of this other than the experience, just like us. I've fucking waited five years for the band, and I feel like we've finally got it.

You have one demo on the Gears Gone Wild compilation for a new song, and you've been working on the new material with different people over time, like Jairus from Ad·ver·sary and Brian Blake. What is the lineup looking like as far as the new album?

Payne: With Transhuman, it was just Drew and I, and then Chris came into the fold and became our touring guitarist. When we did Transhuman 2.0, it was me and Chris mostly, and Drew was out of the picture because he had a lot of personal shit he was going through at the time. Chris and I did that whole album, co-producing it with Prost of mindFluxFuneral at N-U-M Studios, and he's one of our favorite people on earth. So the new lineup for the album is pretty much what it's always been: me, Drew, and Chris, with Prost producing, and then Jamie Duffy from Cracknation is going to be doing guitar production.

That answers the question as to what Duffy's doing, since he wasn't involved in the last Acumen Nation and DJ? Acucrack releases.

Payne: He's fucking working it!

Hryniewiecki: He's working eight days a week.

Payne: Yup, he's working eight days a week doing sound at every club in Chicago. Sometimes he'll call me up and say, 'I'm sitting here behind a board and I'm bored. Come on over, I'll buy you booze, Payne.' This is a good story, and you can keep this. On his birthday a few weeks ago, he calls me up and I go to see him at Cubby Bear, and he's doing sound, and we just start drinking, and then we head over to Neo, and then we drink more, and we do the Rob Zombie drinking game—if you don't know what that is, you can read about it in my blog—and he takes me home, and we're totally shit-faced. He says, 'Hey Sean, we've got to get a pizza, I'm buying.' So we order the pizza, and we're playing the game, but then I end up vomiting all over my computer room and all over Jamie Duffy. And he says, 'Oh, it's OK, son.' He calls me his son. [Laughs.]

You can keep that story because I like people to know I'm a sloppy drunk. I've actually been able to curb my alcohol appetite lately, because I realize the stories are a lot better when you're not falling over.

Cyanotic has tackled a lot of different styles, from industrial to drum 'n bass to metal. Seeing as how a lot of bands are doing that now, such as your new label-mates in Left Spine Down, what sort of different styles are going on now that you'll be integrating into your new music?

Payne: Cyanotic's always been about an amalgamation of sound. We've always been about fusing the industrial with metal, electro, drum 'n bass, and it's going to continue in that vein. But then there are a couple of new things that we want to try out. We have a song that sort of mixes power noise with industrial metal, and then we have a song that's like dark dub with rolling bass, kind of like Godflesh. We're trying to tackle pretty much whatever we like. I don't try to pigeonhole what we do.

The new album's going to be called The Medication Generation, and with a song like 'Beta Blocker' on the first album, you've talked about subjects like the over-medication of today's society. Is it fair to say that this is going to be a concept album, or is it more of just an underlying theme?

Hryniewiecki: A lot of the songs will have ideas revolving around pharmaceutical companies and such.

Payne: I can only sing about what I know. I can't sing about bullshit, and what I know about is pills and TV, and we're known to indulge in a lot of it. The Medication Generation will be a semi-concept album, but it's going to be pretty much about what I write about. 90 percent of the songs I write about are about whenever I'm having a panic attack anyway, like 'Order Out of Chaos' and 'Beta Blocker.' I guess there are some fucking songs in there about robots, too. We've always been a more personalized band, I'd like to think. I can't sing about genocide or war. There's not a lot of humanity to industrial music, and there's not a lot of personalization, and that's what we're trying to break. We're trying to let people know who the fuck we are, in the way that we write our blogs, and letting people know who we are as humans playing music.

Even though you've been around for five years, as a newer band growing up in the digital age, what are your thoughts on the fact that a lot of bands are starting to go backwards, using older techniques and methods?

Hryniewiecki: You've got to accept it, that's all there is to it. It's already started, and there's no stopping it, so we've got to move with it.

Payne: People are probably just scared. They went from vinyl to eight-tracks, and then to tape, and then they went straight to CD. And now we're just in another transition, and it'll take a couple of years, but if you can't embrace digital media, then you might as well get the fuck out of the business. That's where it's all going.

You all have your own different projects. Sean Payne has his project with Matt Fanale of Caustic and Jared Louche of Chemlab.

Payne: The Prude project.

Yes, and Eris has Born into Oblivion and a new solo project as I understand?

Eris: Yes, that's called Narthex. Born into Oblivion is more of a personal project, something that I've had going on for a couple of years. Narthex is more thrashy industrial metal, which is mainly what I'm focusing on right now.

When you say 'thrashy industrial metal...'

Payne: Meshuggah! It's full of polyrhythmic programming, and it's some of the best and coolest programming and the best recorded guitars I've ever heard, especially in demos.

Eris: You know, I've been recording guitars and programming since I was 15, and I'm 23 now. That's a lot of years behind me, and with everything I've done—I've done a lot of hardcore stuff like thrash, industrial, metal—the most natural thing is to really keep it going. That force and brutality, I just keep it going. In Narthex right now, my partner Neuro and I are trying to bring a whole lot of different metal aspects to the table and trying out more electronic metal ideas. I'm finding that more and more metal bands are finding their way into the electronic and industrial community. With a band like Cyanotic, every time we play a show, there are a couple of metal guys who work their way up to the front of the stage and they're really going at it. I think it's a healthy thing to go from electronic and industrial and merging everything together, and that's what Narthex is all about. Born into Oblivion is just pure electronic music; it has that feel.

Now, about Prude, because there actually is a track now on the Gears Gone Wild compilation, how is working in that project different from working in Cyanotic?

Payne: I don't have to build the songs from scratch. I always build the Cyanotic songs from scratch, and I'm always the person who starts it off. But with Prude, sometimes Matt will send me something and I build on top of that, Jared does the vocals and he sends it, and then I work off of that. It's a really interesting collaborative effort that I'm still learning to explore, because I'm usually so hands-on with my stuff. It's interesting to try to pull back and drop a few loops and leave some room for some other people, so I won't write the whole fucking song. It's been really great working with Jared, because he just brings such charisma that is insurmountable. He's the Mick Jagger of industrial music; he's got the strut, the feathered boa, and he's sticking his lips out.

What about Chris, because I know you were in some metal bands before joining Cyanotic?

Hryniewiecki: Well, I did fill in on guitars for a little metalcore band for something around three months, but that was about it. There's mostly Cyanotic for me.

Payne: Well, we do have the MethBong project.

Hryniewiecki: That's our first side project release.

Payne: Yeah, that will be Cyanotic's Revolting Cocks or our H3llb3nt. It's going to be our dick-off side project, and it'll probably be a whole lot of industrial grindcore. But we've got so much going on now, like I have the Prude thing, and I'm six songs in with Ondrea. We're collaborating on existing songs she's already written, and I'm putting all of these extra beats and atmospheres into it, helping co-produce it. She's writing the synths and the main beats and eventually I'm hoping to get vocals in there from Ondrea. We're just figuring it out right now, but the Ondroid thing is going to be a kick in the face to every stupid harsh electro project with female vocals; it will be the anti-suck!

You mentioned a Canadian tour that you're planning, and Eris is Canadian. What have you noticed about Canadian audiences—not just for this music, but music in general—versus U.S. audiences?

Hryniewiecki: They definitely care a lot more.

Payne: Yes, they care a lot more, and I think U.S. audiences are spoiled. In Canada, bands don't get across a lot, so when music from another fucking country, even though it's only six hours away, it's a big fucking deal to them. When we played in Ottowa—Toronto is cool, too—but in Ottowa, there was a very good amount of kids, almost like a sea of kids dancing. Dancing! They're not just standing in the corner with their arms crossed, saying 'I paid 15 dollars to pretend I don't want to be here.' I don't know what it is, but I love Canadians. I don't know if you know this, but every single member in Cyanotic now is either Canadian-born and moved to the States, or lives in Canada. Chris is Canadian-born. I'm Canadian by default because I'm married to a Canadian. Eris is Canadian. Ondrea's Canadian. Jairus is Canadian. Kevin has a lot of Canadian blood. So, I suppose we're Canadian by default. Cyanotic is Canadian by default. Fuck that other Canadian Cyanotic band! Assholes took our name and our domain! Cyanotic.com, we're going to fucking come and beat your ass for it. They've only fucking played like 10 shows in five years. Okay, dudes, give it up and pack it in, pals. We're 10 tours in. Nü-metal is over! Die!

You've recently put out the Gears Gone Wild compilation, and you had mentioned some months ago that you were putting together a Hordes Deux compilation?

Payne: Gears Gone Wild is what Hordes Deux became. It's basically about the cool artwork because I found a lot of pictures of Terminators fucking. Now, I just want to do volumes of it.

Hryniewiecki: It's the whole Kama Sutra in Terminators.

Payne: If I could just keep buying artwork from that guy, I would do Gears Gone Wild: Spring Break. It's on the verge.

Is there anything you want to say to close out?

Payne: We're going to fucking take over at least some small fucking chunk of the world! We are happy to be a part of this, and it's so amazing that people give a shit. I really started this five years ago thinking that I was going to press 1,000 CDs, and just sit on them.

Hryniewiecki: And then they sold out!

Payne: Yeah, they sold out, and we repressed Transhuman, and that sold out. It feels like finally, after five years of hard work, we can go out and play to whatever crowd, and we can actually play to crowds now. It's just fucking incredible! It's just so gratifying to know that people give a shit.