What exactly is the Sister Machine Gun emblem? [above]
Your guess is actually as good as mine. Jim Marcus drew it and nobody has known what it is but him. And I have never thought to ask.

Who selects the artwork on each album?
I do. Generally I will go to which ever artist is doing it. In the first case, it was Eric Zimmerman. In that particular instance, I didn't know how to make a record and Eric did, so I said "I kind of want a primitive type of thing," so he whipped something up. Then with Jimmy for the whole torture technique extravaganza for the singles and posters and everything, Jim Marcus did all of that. I pretty much leave him to his own devices, because it's a lot easier than trying to tell Jimmy to do anything. Some of the artwork, as a result, I am not happy with. The singles, I really liked, but the album, unfortunately, is really not all that much to me. With this new one, I just had a graphic artist who would do what I told him and the dude that painted all of the Skinny Puppy stuff painted the cover. I basically said this is what I want and they made it. It's still not quite all that, but it is very much closer to what I originally intended.

What's the live setup like without Chris?
Much more better. I don't want to dis Chris, he's a good kid. We've got a bass player now, for starters, so it's still a four piece. I'm playing keyboards on the whole set except for in four of the songs we now do. I play guitar in about three of them and don't play at all in a couple. We have a new guitarist, Xmas from Detroit. With Chris Kelly it was always a struggle to get anything done because he's a serious in-charge kind of guy and I am also, so there were personality conflicts there. We don't have that now. He's got his thing and he's in charge and I've got my thing and I'm in charge, which is much better for all parties concerned.

How'd you hook-up with the Die Warzau guys?
Well, I've known them for a while. Jim Marcus was doing this performance art thing with the drummer from Swans and I knew Vinny and they were going to do this performance art thing that was just vocals and drums at The Building in New York and I asked them if they wanted a keyboard player for it. It was only one song, but the song was about fifteen minutes long and they were like sure and that's how I met Jimmy and we hit it off. And after I got done with the KMFDM tour they hooked me up; that's when I met Andy at Chicago Trax, during Die Warzau sessions. We've been fast friends ever since.

What's your favorite facet of the music...recording, composing, playing live?
I'd have to say recording. Recording and composing come at the same time for us. We make everything up in the studio; we don't write at home so to speak of. That's the best because it's a lot easier; granted it takes nine to ten hours a day. But if you fuck something up, you can always do it over; live if you fuck something up, it's fucked up and I don't like that. And we do fuck a lot of things up being the people that we are. There's good and bad things to either one. Recording and spending all of that time in the studio and it gets to be kind of a drag hearing that same high hat over and over again for seven hours, but live is definitely instant gratification. If you're standing up there and you play, people clap.

What kind of following do you have outside of America?
That's a good question. I don't honestly know. Out of our fan club, ten percent is Canadian and maybe another five percent is European. We have a record label in Japan, Polystar, which is a division of Panasonic which distributes SMG stuff in Japan and they've asked us to come over there and tour, but it's a little bit financially prohibited these days. At the Tower at Picadilly Circus there is a Sister Machine Gun bin, which I guess means we're doing all right. It was empty, so they must have sold them or else they got shoplifted. I've seen stores in Germany that had our product also. I'm not sure how it gets there exactly, since we don't have European distribution. We have quite a few, maybe 150 to 200 names on our fanclub are European names. Which means they got the record in on import, which means they tossed up 35 to 40 dollars, which impresses me that they would pay that much for it.

Are you into funk or rap music at all?
That's about all that I listen to is funk to be quite honest with you. Fucking Bill Withers, Barry White, fucking you name it I got it. Isaac Hayes, a lot of Isaac Hayes. Me and Xmas who are the principal. I write the songs and Xmas kind of forms the music around them and that's all the two of us listen to really. I mean, I listen to other stuff. I have a pretty wide base of music. Rap, to be honest, I kind of got over it. I really like the whole LA thing that's going on with Dr. Dre and I was the world's biggest Public Enemy fan for about two years and the Beastie Boys are always cool, but beyond that they are all derivative of those three. You have NWA which was a refinement of Public Enemy and then Dr. Dre started his thing which was basically just P-Funk with rap vocals and that's cool and that sound is really excellent, but a lot of the songs begin to sound alike after a while. So, if you've got one record, you've got them all.

How are things working out with TVT?
They're being pretty good to me, actually. I'm probably the only artist other than Sascha that can say that. Every time we come up with some kooky idea come through. I really liked when Wax Trax was just Wax Trax and we were just a Wax Trax artist. Now everyone will consider us a TVT artist eventhough we are still a Wax Trax band. Our contract isn't with TVT, it's with Wax Trax. But for all intents and purposes there are only two people who work for Wax Trax as opposed to the 35 on the other side. I like being a Wax Trax artist, as opposed to a TVT artist cause I still have some kind of control over my destiny...you see where I'm going with that.

Whose idea was it to put the little cryptic messages in the last album?
That was Jimmy. Did you decode all of that? A friend of mine decoded one of them. It's funny because I get a lot of faxes and mail from people like "God damn you, I fucking figured this out and it doesn't say anything," but that's pretty much the size of it. More Jim Marcus fun and games.

Have you done production for any other bands?
I just finished doing a demo, three songs, for this band named The Aggression from New York who are pretty heavily into the net. That's how I met them, actually. That came out pretty good; it's kind of White Zombie/KMFDM vibe with a little rougher vocals. That Crocodile Shop album that interestingly enough just came out, but I actually did that back in 1991. So everyone thinks that I just did it, but my skills are a little beyond that now. That was the first thing I ever did besides Sister Machine Gun, so it was kind of an odd situation.

Why do you think that the only bands on a large scale who have been successful within the industrial genre are Nails and Ministry?
I don't know. Ministry is pallitible to a larger audience. With Nine Inch Nails it was a fluke. He had a good record with good songs and TVT made it so that people could like it. They packaged it properly and Trent the way he did his shows back in the day and chose the bands that he opened for carefully to appeal to a wider audience, it was a big marketing plan and it worked better than anyone could have expected. I just saw the Nails Bowie show here last week. It's basically the same band through the whole show. You have Nails, then you have Nails and Bowie, then you've got Nails and Bowie and Bowie's band, and then you've got Bowie and Bowie's band and then Trent comes out. It's a spectacle; it's like a 70s rock spectacle. I think people get tired of seeing nothing but a fucking rock show, they want to see a performance. You have something like Candlebox or Stone Temple Pilots or something, they look like they work at the Arco down the street. And then they fucking get up their and play these rock songs, which are three chord songs, and they don't do anything except stand up there and play and on occasion break something. Now, Nine Inch Nails is a performance, it's a spectacle. It's not so much how you play as it's the way you play it. We're moving the Sister Machine Gun a little in that direction, not to take a piece of Nails, because it's a totally different sound. A lot of the other bands, Ministry and Nails being good examples and KMFDM being another, have taken their roots and just added heavy metal and then you get what industrial is today and we took where we started with Sins of the Flesh and added funk. And it's not like Die Warzau's funk either, it's a much deeper funk. It's like anyone can play fucking death metal chords over a fucking drumbeat, that's not hard. It's a lot harder to make a musical song that comes off. Are we still industrial, well who knows? That's neither here or there. I don't care, we just make the kind of music we want to make and if people want to call us a funk band or an AOR band or an industrial band, more power to them.

So, are you going to be in Kerrang magazine soon?
Uhh, no! We're in Wired this month. They reviewed the record. And they basically said, it fucking caught me off guard, they said, I basically didn't understand it, this guy must perceive music differently than I do, but most music critics do, but he said that God Lives Underwater and Filter were trying to do what we did with Torture Technique, which I really didn't see. But I'll give him that, if he wants to say it a lot of people are going to believe him and that's cool. And we just take it the other way and leave all the other bands playing catch-up. It just kind of cracks me up. It's a really flattering statement.

Currently on tour throughout much of the U.S., SMG promises a West Coast tour in March with the Jesus Christ Pornostars themselves, Chemlab. DO NOT MISS THIS ONE!!! To keep up to date on what the band is doing, check out The SMG Page.