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An Interview with Jason Novak of Acumen Nation
Posted: Sunday, October 26, 2008
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

My fellow Crackwhores: the state of the Cracknation goes strong! Having spent more than a decade at the forefront of the industrial rock movement, Acumen Nation still stand as a shining example of the merits of perseverance and evolution in an underground scene in constant danger of stagnation. As if their incorporation of heavy metal guitars with varying forms of industrialized electronic music wasn't enough, Jason Novak and Jamie Duffy have also come and conquered in the club scene with DJ? Acucrack, blasting out their eclectic mix of trance, breakbeat, and drum 'n bass to crossover audiences this side of the Atlantic. While not the first group of artists to start their own label, they laid the blueprint for a generation of rivetheads and electrophiles with their Cracknation label, providing a home for their various outlets, from the coldwave onslaught of Acumen to the electrified frenzy of Acucrack to the ambient dreamscapes of Fawn. Their D.I.Y. approach both in the studio and on the stage has carried them through euphoric highs and devastating lows. No strangers to touring, last year saw them share the stage with Cyanotic, bridging the gap between the older and newer generations on the West Coast leg of the PsychoTransHumanoid tour. A year has passed, Cracknation have released their second Artifacts record, chronicling many of their early works before the release of the first Acumen album, Acucrack released a new live CD along with a series of one-off shows in the summer, and the time has come for the Cracknation to conquer the East Coast on the second leg of the tour. Jason Novak brings ReGen up to speed on the state of Cracknation, touching on the band's ever shifting lineup, touring with Cyanotic, gear and equipment in the modern era, and even offering some insights into the label's current projects.

Let's talk about the lineup. On the last leg of the tour, your brother Ethan had returned to the group to play bass, and Dan Brill and Jamie Duffy are still in the band. Is this going to be the same lineup for the East Coast leg?

Novak: It's the same line up, but we're not doing the same set. Some of the songs will be the same, but we're thinking of this as the second leg of the tour – it's just been a year break in the middle. We all wished that we could've done the whole country, but with the way everybody's schedules are and with the economics of touring these days, we've found that it's much easier to do shorter legs. As people's lives progress, it's harder to get that much time off from jobs or being away from family, so we can do a nice consolidated set of dates in a shorter amount of time as opposed to having a couple of days off here and there. It was just coincidental that it took about a year to put it together. Ethan will be joining us, as Eliot Engelman has restarted his life in Arizona. More power to him. We would have loved to have had him, and we had entertained the possibility of having Greg Lopez and Eliot and Ethan and have everybody take a two week vacation and have a sort of all-star lineup, but it didn't come to be. So it's the same lineup from last year.

You mentioned a different set, and since there was no actual tour to support Psycho the Rapist when that was released, how much of the newer material can audiences expect to hear this time around?

Novak: The biggest problem with trying to shoehorn all of this material in is if we're going to do an Acumen set and an Acucrack set, or even Acumen opening for other bands is having a decent and long enough time to do a proper set that could really pull the favorites from all the albums as well as concentrate on the new ones. We're trying to squeeze all of this into a 50 or 55-minute set, because the way the tour is set up, Acumen is playing in the middle, so we can't exactly take an hour and 20 minutes to do the all-star set. With that in mind, and the fact that people still love to hear the old songs, it's going to be heavy on the old material with just a handful of new tracks.

It's interesting that you'll be playing older material, because you've also talked about how Psycho the Rapist had those four-on-the-floor moments that were reminiscent of the older Acumen sound. Would you say that the band is coming full circle in that sense, and what sort of new material post-Psycho is in the works that might run in line with that?

Novak: There is nothing in the pipeline at the moment. At some point, I will promote this new project that Dan and Brian Elza from Bridgelayer, who played with us for about a year in 2003, the three of us have started a new project that we're going to start focusing on next year. That project is still unnamed. That's going to be very math metal, somewhat in the vein of Tool or Mastadon. Whether or not we're going to go down the whole avenue of trying to bring that about with a full album and tour and break a new band...I think I'm way beyond that at this point. But as far as feeding our souls and doing what we want to do, Psycho and Humanoids from the Deep, and how I worked on those solely...I'll never say it's the end, but the style of those two records definitely comes full circle and goes back to the way Acumen and Acucrack both started sonically. I have no idea what's next for either of those projects. I'm sure we'll pound out another record at some point, but for now, we're veering off into another direction.

You do have the new Fawn record coming out.

Novak: That was a rough decision, because we had this terrible hard drive crash, and we lost a bunch of archives. I've been holding onto the Fawn material for years, getting ready to figure out how to start putting it all together and record and create a second record. This hard drive crash pushed it into the thought that we waited this long and if we hadn't, then we wouldn't have lost the material. It only amounted to a few songs, but I started to collect everything I had, and I was even calling a couple of friends that I'd given demos to years ago, and it was like, 'Please tell me you still have this,' because they were the only fucking copies of the backing tracks, and sure enough, some of those people have managed to come through. I was able to put this together with a few new tracks and a few of the old compilation tracks. It felt like now was the time to just get this out and finally clear the vault of all the Fawn stuff. I'm really excited about that because I busted my ass on it. We don't work as a traditional label. We don't need the three month lead time. We don't work with big distributors. We can make a decision like this: six weeks before the tour to just put this record out, rush it out to the manufacturer, press a few hundred copies and have it in time for the tour, put it up on the Web site, iTunes, and Metropolis, and the people who want it can have it.

The last time DJ? Acucrack performed live, it was just you doing a few one-off shows. Having worked with Jamie for so long, how did you find that approaching the material was different without him?

Novak: I did those shows just to feed my beast and keep reforming. Jamie's been really busy, and our schedules weren't really matching. Economically, flying out with more than one person, and for us to share hotels and all of that, forget it! I was up for exploring different and older styles of music, and Jamie wasn't really involved in that, so it was fun for me to just do it all on my own. They were much more like DJ sets, and I was playing a lot of old-school industrial mash-ups and incorporating some of the old Artifacts material. It was more of a DJ thing instead of just playing our own tracks and messing around with them. It was fun to be nervous again. I was terrified, to tell you the truth. San Francisco was the first one, and I opened up for Thrill Kill Kult, and I was about to go on stage, and I thought, 'This is the first time I'm stepping up on stage by myself to do anything. How am I going to pull this off? I'm really going to stand up here by myself, push buttons, and sing in front of a laptop like this? It's stupid!' But after the first 10 minutes, I was confident and doing vocals and I had the video behind me, and the crowd really liked it, so it worked out and I can see doing it more. Plus, everything is so spontaneous, and a lot of times Jamie will do something or I'll do something that the other won't expect, and it sometimes causes some clashes and volume issues. It was kind of fun to do away with all of those and to know that every sound that is being made, I knew exactly what was going on. It was a bit of a control freak thing, but it was fun. With that set in mind, that's how these Acucrack sets are going to be in the way that we've designed the lineup. The way we've done it in the past, trying to put Acumen on as the headliner and always getting screwed by opening bands and technical difficulties, and then the four of us are standing around an hour before the club's about to close...that just sucks the life right out of it. So this time, we're going to put the live band on in the middle and close the night out with this mash-up DJ set that can go totally with the way the night is going. If it's a disaster and there are only 10 people left in the club, then we can take that as it goes. If the place is hopping with old-school goths, then we can totally play a set to them. If there are all of a sudden a bunch of drum 'n bass kids there, then we can close the night for them in that fashion. It's going to give us a little bit of an ability to make the end of the night parlayed to that particular city and the way the night's going. We're excited about that!

You mentioned including the Artifacts material into the DJ sets, and considering that a lot of the older Acumen material has been unearthed in the Artifacts releases, what are the chances that the band might revisit those tracks in a live setting?

Novak: Pretty nil. The closest it'll get will probably be in the Acucrack sets because they're so devoid of live instruments. I'm not going to take anything away from synth bands, but for any of them to sit there and really show you how they're triggering stuff live and playing stuff live vs. running virtual tracks and dropping a few notes on top of it, I mean, we're guilty of it too, but if we were going to come out and say, 'This is the Artifacts set,' we'd have to put so much work into having enough pride in what would come out to have a bank of synths and tons of things being triggered and being played live by multiple people. There are no live drums, no guitars, so we'd really have to go down this avenue that I'd quite frankly not be excited about doing. I'd much rather put these really electronic tracks into a DJ set, maybe remix them a little bit on stage, throw some vocals on there, and that seems to lend itself to a much better way to represent the Artifacts material. Even back in the day when we were doing that shit in the early '90s, we knew the limitations. We had performance artists and dancers and costume changes and TV screens, and it was very much a Skinny Puppy rip-off because there was no real music being played except for a little bit of stand-up live drums, tribal toms, and maybe some tinny guitars.

With the older albums and with Artifacts, you guys are well known for using the Roland W-30, while on later albums you've thanked Native Instruments in the liner notes. Having gone from hardware to software and utilizing both in your music, what have you found are the most significant advances being made, and how do you feel that you guys are using them to your advantage?

Novak: That's a good question, and I'm probably the worst person to answer it. Deep down, I'm not a gear-head. I usually figure out a piece of gear enough to use it and do exactly what I want to do with it, and then a year later, Jamie will happen to be there while I'm working on something and say, 'Don't you know you can control...or click this and...' He would sit there and virtually pick apart software and hardware to figure out all the cool stuff that it does, whereas I'm just too impatient, and I just want to make music and a base sound, so I figure out just how to get there. I think that time-stretching and pitchshifting is just amazing, and that with stuff like Ableton and ProTools, that stuff is getting more attention. I've got the W-30 next to me right now to pull the old loops and stuff off it for the live set and some of the backing tracks we're going to do on the tour. I miss the compression of that 12-bit sampling. If you open up any digital audio workstation and find the plug-in that takes a 16-bit or 24-bit sample and you can down-sample it, it still doesn't sound anything like a natural old-school 12-bit sampler. It just made the nicest compression and it made everything sound good. You didn't have to know anything about EQ-ing, and I love using tape decks and playing things in reverse and pitching things down manually, just as any older person will miss certain elements of the way you used to be able to do things. I was so much more experimental when I didn't have shit. Now that I have all of this shit, it's so hard to say, 'Don't just use the patch. Tweak it, add to it, and make it your own.' Sometimes I find myself doing it just for the sake of integrity because if I hear a sound, and I think it's cool, I'll use it. We were one of the first people to get our hands on the original Absynth because we were doing demos for DigiDesign at the time, and they never have any money to pay anybody, so we'd always get software and gear. They gave us Absynth while we were making The 5ifth Column at the time, so we ended up putting tons of that stuff on there, knowing full well that we were going to be some of the first people to use it. 'Fuck it, this just sounds so cool! Leave the patch as it originally was.' And then over the years, more people got their hands on Absynth, and in my opinion, it was in their court to change the patch and all, even though that's really silly. I don't really delve way too much into the gear to figure out all of its nuances, which is probably a shame.

You've toured with Cyanotic before and worked with Sean several times; he appeared on Psycho, and you produced Transhuman, and you've done remixes together. Both of you have spoken about how on the last leg of the tour, you taught them a lot about life on the road. What are your thoughts on how this tour is shaping up and how Cyanotic have developed since last year?

Novak: I think he's gotten a lot of help from Bit Riot and they were really forthcoming with splitting promotional costs, so that's been good for him, and they're really good people. This is the first time he's having a live drummer while touring with us, so we're going to have to wrestle with that. We'll see what happens, because we're taking out the same goofy vehicle and the same amount of people, and we're all working really hard to make sure everything is really linear and if we can fit something inside of something else. We want to make it a very well oiled machine. We're not paring anything down in terms of the show, but we do want to make everything really slick, and we want to make it a really seamless transition between the Acumen and Acucrack sets, and so for us, I don't know what Sean's going to bring, but I hope that it's tight and that it works really well. He's proud of where they're moving to and incorporating the live drummer. I kind of enjoyed them being the only band on the road with Acumen not having live drums for the most part. Sonically, it's going to be a little different than what we wanted by having a band without live drums playing before Acumen, but I'm sure it's going to work out and be really cool.

So how about Acumen playing live? What can you say about how playing live has been shaping up for you after having done it for so many years?

Novak: It's hard enough to pull this off every time, and I don't want to sound any alarms, but god knows when the hell we'll be able to do this again. As far as playing all of these old songs and this new project with Brian, our hearts are really into that, and we want to play local shows again. With Ethan living in Los Angeles and Eliot leaving, Acumen can't do a local show. We get asked every so often for metal nights or festivals, but we can't do it unless we're touring, and that's taken a lot of the fun out of being in a band. I want to get back to just being able to go back to playing out on a Friday night and playing a show in my neighborhood and my city or opening for a band at some bigger club. We just can't do that anymore, so this tour is going to be a good opportunity to get everybody together, see some old friends, visit some old cities, and play some old songs. I don't want to sound any warning bells, but I can't imagine when the next time we can do that will be. Of course, somebody will call us next year and say, 'We're putting together this thing,' and then we'll be right back on top of it. I can't see myself going out of my way to set up a headlining tour like this again. Some of these songs that we're really excited about playing, these oldies and the old-school industrial Acucrack set...we've never done that before; it just always seems to be heavy on the jungle. This set's going to be really heavy on the retro and old mash-ups, like the live Acucrack record we just put out. That could lead to a lot of fun and games as Jamie and I come in with an arsenal of unexpected samples and loops, and who knows? You might be listening to Nitzer Ebb and the next thing you know, MC Hammer comes sliding in to piss you off. I'm looking forward to that!