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SubQtaneous

Is there a connection between Collide's Beneath the Skin and SubQtaneous? Scott Landes, who is featured prominently on your album, makes music with kaRIN and Statik of Collide, and SubQtaneous means more or less 'beneath the skin.' Was that intentional or accidental? It seems very serendipitous.

Curcio: The 'Q' is kind of a bad joke on NyQuil, implying, I guess, that it's a drug that'll knock you unconscious. 'Subcutaneous,' is how it's spelled properly, I think. Anyhow, it's purely coincidence. I think Collide is doing some really cool stuff, especially recently, but there's no direct connection. I actually ran the idea of laying down some vocals on this album by kaRIN, but understandably she was swamped with work at the time, and it didn't come together.

You do a lot of writing, but isolated from books and from words, what do you want to do musically?

Curcio: I could be flippant and make up some shit about it being about the sex and drugs, but I'll be honest: music is an escape for me. Itself. I know it's a cliché, but it's about the process, the physicality of it, the way it just completely annihilates thought. You know, if you are thinking in a lot of words while you're playing, there's no way you're 'in the pocket.' I don't know, that may be why I have a hard time putting vocals in center stage rather than integrating them into the whole of the sound.

I was talking to someone about how I find phone sex and internet sex bizarre, and it's because language immediately turns on my analytical mind. I'm analytical by nature, and tend to be somewhat litigious when it comes to words. Sex is a means of getting the hell away from that, and music is the same. See, maybe it is about the sex and drugs. This may be why I've moved from guitar to bass to drums. Drums really got me, just playing djembe in the dirt with roving bands of drummers at festivals.

How do you feel about your directions, musically, in the past and in the possible future?

Curcio: Since Babalon, I haven't really had a solid band that I regularly rehearsed with and wrote material with; it's all of these studio projects. So I'd really like to get a band together, get my chops back up, and get some solid material together so we can raise energy live. It's just the time, energy, and resources that that consumes are pretty considerable, and there are a lot of drama dynamics you have to deal with in a band that you get less of with non-local studio projects. A band is like a marriage.

A good band needs a lot of money just for equipment.

Curcio: Definitely. And then there are the drugs, the hookers...

I love the fusion in SubQtaneous, the genre-splitting elements of it; it doesn't feel cheesy or forced. It feels almost respectful.

Curcio: Honestly, I think that's because it's incidental. I don't mean it's not a core part of the project, but the whole project kind of just happened. I had a general idea in mind for what the album was 'about,' which formed as the initial content was coming together, but aside from talking to the musicians about that general idea, none of us tried to force it into one style or other. It's the music we made when we weren't trying to make other music. Really, this project started out as outtakes of things that were too weird or out there for Babalon, and when Babalon broke up, I just kept with it.

There's a vibe that flows through Babalon which I didn't get from SubQtaneous. SubQtaneous also seems a thing unto itself, an artifact or a drug, not just an album. You took a lot more care in doing post-production.

Curcio: Yeah, we reworked this thing on and off for years. And maybe I don't think it's perfect, I don't think anything is ever perfect, but eventually it fully becomes 'what it is.' And you just have to sit back and say, 'There's my baby. So what if he's a little cross-eyed and has buckteeth?' The strength and weakness of this project is you really have to listen to it. It's not something you can put on in the background and half listen to, if you want to get much from it, and it's not something that is made with the intention of making you feel like a bad-ass as you peel around town in your pickup truck.

Why are you so patient with these projects?

Curcio: 'Obsessive' might be a better term. I do something, and think its done, and listen to it, and play it for thirty people, and then want to change it, and do that several hundred times. A project is done usually when I'm convinced, based on the intention of the project, that I simply can't do any more. Or if I just want to puke at the thought of opening up the project files again.

That said, you've got some seriously good ears. The production is stellar for a project like this. Have you thought about doing videos for SubQtaneous in some way?

Curcio: Yes, but first off, I have to give Ken some props on the ears thing. She has an approach to production that's almost opposite of mine; her strongest work is oftentimes very minimal, but really rich. I do a lot of layering and crazy processing, so we kind of balanced each other out. That's why I brought it to her. To be honest, I was hesitant at first with this project, because I thought it'd either work really well or really badly, and as an old friend, that can be a weird position to be in. I'm happy it was the former and not the latter case. It's a much stronger work from our collaboration. The production was originally me, then I brought Ken in on the pre-mixes to do remixing and mastering. In the process we rerecorded a lot of material. As for the other musicians, the roster is really pretty long. I've honestly lost count. The core people are myself, Ken, Scott (Collide, Mankind Is Obsolete) and Peter (Veil of Thorns, Choronzon).

Scott is in Mankind Is Obsolete too?

Curcio: Yeah, he joined them I think about six months ago. He's a world class player. Scott and I had a rough patch in terms of our friendship because of a lot of pent up shit around Babalon and things that happened back then, which I think we've gotten past, but our creative relationship has always been incredibly fertile. I doubt I'll ever find a guitarist I can work with as well as him. One of the other guitarists I brought in on the project, Ryan Moll, is more of the technical kind of player. He is in Rumpelstiltskin Grinder, which is on Relapse. The character of Cody in Fallen Nation is primarily based on Scott. There are pieces of myself and some other people in there, but it's mostly Scott.

It's interesting seeing how people mesh based on their approaches. It's not about genre; it's more about energy.

Curcio: Yes, it is, and it's about your ear and your expression. Many players get caught up in trying to impress or trying to be 'really good,' but most of the people I wind up playing with just know what to play by feeling it.

This seems more important in what SubQtaneous did, which was non-local creation.

Curcio: It's not unprecedented for Scott and I; we started Babalon with an experimental project, Babalon's Descent, which was produced with him in Los Angeles and Sarah and I in upstate New York. Back then, I was working out of a studio we built as an adjunct of a media company we'd co-founded. The studio was called Orangeface, the company Evolving Media. Anyhow, we both came a long way since we did Descent in 2002. It just made the process of recording music with each other and passing tracks back and forth on the Internet a lot easier, because we had a routine.

What kind of effect do you believe is embedded within Some Still Despair? What's the message?

Curcio: I know this isn't particularly inspiring, but the first word that comes to mind is 'frustration.' There's an overtone in a lot of the tracks of frustration at the inanity of modern/popular culture.

Frustration with the culture?

Curcio: That seems to be one of the primary threads. A lot of the music mocks it.

Is this in reaction to that 'rah-rah' stuff after September 11?

Curcio: Not consciously. There is something interesting with that, though I don't know if it's related or not. I was in upstate New York during 9/11, and I had a lot of friends in New York City. And in the time after the attack, something happened that I'd never seen before: there was almost a feeling of real community within the 'community,' and if you want to get at the root of the frustration, it's that we don't have a culture. Not a vital one, anyway. Not a healthy one. We had almost as many people killed on the streets of the city I live in as soldiers killed in Iraq last year.

With projects like SubQtaneous, there's a lot of visceral commentary, emotional reaction to things, and some of it is so subtle I don't expect people to 'get it' so much as feel it. I still catch things sometimes when I'm listening that I didn't recognize before. I try to keep the explicit commentary out of my music. I already do enough grandstanding in my writing.

Now we see Trent Reznor and Saul Williams working together. Fusion has gone mass. I think it's a reflection of the edge that SubQtaneous is charting out so well.

Curcio: This is news to me, and something I'd want to hear. I saw Saul perform in a play in Los Angeles several years back. I can't for the life of me remember the name of it. He was a man in a war-torn African country. It was a small production, small venue. I spoke to him for a little while after the show, though I'm sure it's like a lot of the people I've talked to in studios or after shows; I remember the details, but they probably wouldn't remember my face. I've been on the other side of that, getting flocked after a show, so I totally get that.

I have to admit being heavily influenced by Trent Reznor's production; I just can't stand his voice. But if you want to look at the roots of my approach to production, Trent's a big chunk of it. I know that's so uncool to say, but I don't really care. It's the truth. I probably wouldn't have gotten interested in production if it wasn't for him, so I have to give him props for that.

He brings in good people.

Curcio: That's a lot of what production is. A music producer should know engineering, but you can bring in engineers. Knowing the right person out of the people you know to do this or that, and how to create the scenario that'll bring out the best performance... That's a big chunk of what I do, whether we're talking about graphic novels I've worked on or albums or books. Sure, I do all the hands-on work that I can, based on my skills and strengths, but I'm always on the lookout for people to bring in, people that I can work with, who have a certain approach or spin to their work that I think will give it the right tone. Of course, some of that is also just circumstantial, who you bump into at the party when a given project is on your mind, but it's not totally haphazard either. Right now, I have a pretty strong group of people organized to try to take this kind of freelance, off-the-cuff process to the next level. Obviously that requires a fairly substantial amount of financial resources to launch, so we've been planning that out. We have a lot of really stellar, unusual content in the wings waiting to be released. Actually, SubQtaneous is among those project; I just decided to put up a print-on-demand version because some people have been waiting a long time for this.

You're talking about Mythos Media? Before we get into some of your other projects, I thought you said the new Irreality.net was going to be a porn site? Irreality is definitely a Grid 2 construct, based on the 'grids' you laid out in your first novel, Join My Cult!

Curcio: Yeah, that hive concept with me and Irreality developed simultaneously without any interaction, for a while. I mean, neither of what we were doing is derivative, at least of each other. I think the most recent version of their site and web community is really a cut above anything they've done before. For those who haven't read Join My Cult!, or for those who did, and weren't on strong enough drugs to make sense of it, there is this idea of emergence as a principle of consciousness and culture, and that's tied somewhat satirically into this beehive metaphor through a drug cult called the 'Mother Hive Brain.' And they have a similar idea; well, if people poke around the site, they'll see what I mean. I didn't come on Irreality till Version 6 or something like that, and then I got to know Angelina a little better through the Generation Hex project, which we both wrote for.

There's a lot of material referring to Mother Hive Brain online, all linking back to to your own sites. Do you ever think, 'Screw this dead horse, I'm moving on,' or is this all deeper embedding you'll use later in some way? Parts of a greater whole?

Curcio: I've kind of 'killed' Join My Cult! in a way. I mean, I haven't killed it, but I've certainly moved past it. The index of the Web site now links to my project blog, rather than what used to be the site. But I don't know, I'm always saying, 'Screw this dead horse, I'm moving on,' from project to project. They're all made by me or produced by me or what-have-you, so though I may change, there's still more that's the same about me than is different, from one year to the next. Now I'm wrapping up what is mostly a linear novel, Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning, so people may say it's very different because I'm experimenting with a different approach. But everything I do is built up on what came before. There are cross-references between SubQtaneous and Fallen Nation, certain elements of Babalon were written into that story, there are references and clues within Descent which refer to Join My Cult! and vice versa. It's all a palimpsest. God, I love that word.

So you're distancing yourself from the old book in a way to get the new book on stage?

Curcio: Yes, and because Join My Cult! is like the 'subconscious' of Fallen Nation, that book makes so much more sense in retrospect. I mean, some people got it as a first work, but I think a lot of people, without a frame of reference, just get confused and even sometimes downright angry. I don't know if it's how things will play out or not, but my hope is that more people will find Fallen Nation, and then they'll go digging and find Join My Cult!, and maybe they'll have a little more context to understand it with.