DOWNLOAD

Despite some difficulties getting into this wonderful country of ours (ahem), the band made their way to Eugene's very own WOW Hall where we caught up with cEvin for a brief chat...

So what happened with you guys at the border?
cEvin key: We just got stuck for about 4 hours longer than we had hoped. They let us go with the truck at the border at six o'clock, so we made it to Portland at a quarter to eleven.

Who is Stanley Pain?
CK: He's a fictitious character, mostly just created throughout this one particular night. When we were making that track, the last track on the album, it sounded like the voice we were fucking around with, excuse my language, it sounded like he was saying something about 'Stanley Pain' and so we were saying, 'oh, the worst something...the eyes of Stanley Pain.' I think Mark said 'the eyes of Stanley Pain' and we said, yeah, that's it. It just seemed logical that it should be the name of the album and I said, yeah, it should be. But there's a park in our city called Stanley Park. I don't think that has any relevance. (laughs)

How does it feel to be liberated from American Records?
CK: It feels extremely positive. (laughs) That was the worst...

How did you guys get hooked up with them in the first place?
CK: Because at the time, everything was a lot different it seemed, like they were going to be the best label for us to do what we needed to do, which was to make the best album we could. All that story about Alternative Press is a big pile of bullshit, them trying to get out of it by saying this and that. It's a long story, but to make a long story short, we got out of it in sort of a bad way. Well, it's a good way, we learned our lesson by it, but we also got damaged by it. In a lot of ways it killed the band, but in a lot of ways it gave birth to the real thing, the real issues, which are today like we can exist and pretend like things don't exist. Pretend that horrible things that are happening to us don't exist. But, in this case, we had to do something about it, we couldn't just let that happen. It was so bad, something had to come about, either off the label or the break-up of the band. The band couldn't exist and go on. We were forced to make a decision and some sort of action and I think the action that came about was to just go back to the music, just to start making the music again is what we wanted to do. It's not like we just switched suddenly and said we're not going to do Skinny Puppy anymore, we're going to do Download. It was all of a sudden, we _were_ making different music than what everybody wanted to hear as that particular project.

How did the particular line-up for Download get together?
CK: Friends. We were just all friends. Mark Spybey came through me and Phil came through Dwayne and we all started hanging out together talking about how it's too bad we can't have this much fun making music.

Just out of curiosity, will there be any Tear Garden or Cyberaktif albums coming out in the near future?
CK: Yes. We've finished the Tear Garden album and it will be out next month (September). For the people who've heard it, it's a very moody album, very dark and very personal. It's an album about sadness and stuff. It's called "To Be An Angel Blind, The Cripple Soul Divide." Even the cover, it was done by Steve Stapleton. It's very, very acoustic as well. Most of the instrumentation on the thing was recorded live and without the aid of sequencers or digital recording.

How did you get Dave McKean to do the album art for The Eyes of Stanley Pain?
CK: At the time, we... I can't remember. It came about through Offbeat Records in Germany, who we worked with and they suggested Dave McKean. I was familiar with his work from The Sandman and thought it would be great, and Bill Leeb worked with him as well, so I knew that he was accessible at that point. We actually asked him on short notice to the Brap sleeve, because the original artist we had backed out because he had some personal trauma. So we asked Dave McKean to start with Brap: Back and Forth 3 and 4 or 5 and 6, whatever it is. (laughs)

Is Download going to be your main project?
CK: Yeah. Download, Tear Garden, Doubting Thomas, I have another project...

Are you going to do another Doubting Thomas project?
CK: Yeah, but with a limited a scope because, of course, with the passing of Dwayne, we have no more future material. We just have material that hasn't been released, there's a fair amount. Luckily we were smart about how we documented our progress. Since about '86, that's when we first started working with a computer and we were able to document all the disks, all the files, all the samples since then, so that we could do remixes of our own songs later. But now, those things have kind of turned into maps of what we did then and everything, so I'm trying to preserve that and I'm running into tons of songs that we never used. Because we'd write 50 or 60 songs, but we'd only use 13 or 14.

So what do you find yourself sampling from these days?
CK: Ourselves. Like we sampled ourselves a lot, we have so many DATs, so many tapes, so many recordings and stuff that we've been saving for 15 years.

I was curious how the music comes together?
CK: With Download, we have a pretty balanced system, because Phil is like such an avid writer anyway. Everybody continues to write their own music and that's something we've always felt good about. Then when we come together, people bring their ideas and influences together and commonly we'll try to share the concept of music where someone will take one area and someone will take another area and we'll share that situation. Lately it's come down to it that we tend to use a lot of analog stuff lately, just dusting everything off and hooking it back up has inspired me in a new direction, so I've been handling a lot of analog and rhythmic stuff, whereas Phil tends to use mostly wave-synthesis or FM-synthesis, which has a different quality. He's more of a digital sound manipulator, where I'm more of an analog synthesizer manipulator or electronic drummer. Mark, with his zoviet-france background, is into acoustic treatments, using minimalist toys and instruments, once again creating a totally different timber, a different sound, a different component. When these things come together, they don't often clash because they're coming from such different areas that they blend well together. And Dwayne was always right on top of the digital edge. The K2000 was his weapon of choice, I've never seen anyone else play a K2000 like Dwayne. For what it's worth, I would think that would be a different quality as well.

If you get a chance to see Download in your town, check them out. We missed them (ugh! long story...) but heard very good things from others who actually made it. Also the new Tear Garden is quite good and should be available very soon.