SISTER MACHINE GUN

How much time did you spend in the studio composing and recording Metropolis?
Composing and recording are the same for me. The writing period, I like to call that, lasted about 2 1/2 months and then we mixed it in a month.

How would you compare Metropolis to Burn or to one of your past releases?
I wouldn't want to compare it. I try to compare it. I try to make them all into a unit that can stand on its own. All four albums are quite different from each other. I try to keep that occurring and let each album be its own thing rather than getting caught in a rut where I'm making the same album over and over again because that one record had our hit on it.

Do you try to reach a certain sound with each album or do you just let the songs develop on their own?
I try to. Every album we've written, I've written, I've tried to have a big plan for it before I started recording it and then tried to be true to that thing, but it never works out that way, so it ends up being the individual songs. It starts out as an album idea and then it ends up getting down to the individual songs where each one has its own little flavor. I'm never like "this is the way it's going to be." I'm very open. A lot of the songs completely change their character by the time they actually get mixed. Like "Desperation," for example, from the new album started as a very slow song with just a little string part playing and by the end it's a big romper stomper. You never know what is going to happen.

The variety of songs on the albums seems fairly varied, but at the same time they sound like Sister Machine Gun songs.
That's going to stand to reason seeing that we perform them. I try to cross a lot of paths on every album. I didn't get that so much on the first album, but ever since then I have tried to get as much on each record as possible. Different kinds of music and make the record as different from its predecessor. I don't know exactly how successful I am at that.

Was it your idea for the fairly minimal packaging?
Yeah, I never liked our album art. Not since the beginning. By the time I get done with the album, I'm like "I can't take this anymore," I'm sick of it basically. And then we want to get a release date and end up hurrying and it's just a big mess. So with this one I was like "here's my idea, just make it occur. I want it to be very simple." It's actually the most expensive packaging we've done, ironically, with the raised letters and the digipack which costs more than a normal jewel case, and the silver ink. Each of those affects the price of the compact disc for the label to make it. So they were less than excited about it, let's say. Their artist actually came up with it. We had come up with a couple of artists that were going to do our normal big extravaganza, which would have just gone back and forth until I was tired of it. One of their artists came up with this idea and I really liked it. It fit the theme of the album very well. The record isn't about the artwork. What does the artwork have to do with the songs? It's just a case for carrying the CD around, that's all it is. There's no point in making a big extravaganza when that's all it is is a wallet to hold the CD.

Whose idea was it to have Lisa do the rant on "This Metal Sky?"
I was going to have an intro piece for the album when it was a concept album and I had a theme. She does a lot of poetry and I had asked her to write a piece for me. When she read it, it sounded good when she did it. So I was like "why don't you just do it?" She had never gone in the studio or done anything like that before. She actually just read the piece and I recorded it on a DAT.

How does Metropolis play live?
Quite well. It's nice to have new songs to play. We've played the old ones so many times. We finished the album last November and we've played almost 80 shows by now and I'm starting to get tired of the new songs. It's nice to have so many, now we have so many to choose from. I have 45 songs that are recorded that I could play. And of course there are the remixes or we could always change them live. So nowadays we're doing a lot of the old songs that we never did before like "Disease" which was always a song that people wanted to do. Songs like that. They actually go over quite well live. There are some we have to play like "Not My God" and "Addiction" and "Nothing" and shit like that. On the whole we can choose whatever we want.

Are you going back on the road again soon?
Yeah, where are you?

In Eugene, Oregon, actually.
My old stomping grounds. I'm from Hermiston (OR). We're doing a tour, it's a Wax Trax tour, which are all the bands that are on there except KMFDM. We're doing that starting the last week of September, I believe. It will be us and Pig and Cubanate and Chainsuck and possibly members of Juno Reactor doing turntables in between the sets. It's only sixteen shows and it's only east coast. They couldn't afford...whenever a record label has more than one band out it gets to be really expensive. It's expensive enough for us to be out, let alone with three other bands on the label. So they could only afford sixteen shows and also Raymond Watts of Pig had to go out with KMFDM in October, so we had to get done before then. So unfortunately that won't come out to you to make a long story short. Then at the end of October we're going out with Prong and a yet unnamed opening band. That will be a nationwide tour.

Any chances of touring overseas yet?
I'd like to. We've had a couple of offers, but none of them that would actually pay for us to get over there and actually tour. We just got major distribution over there. We hadn't had it for years. So it actually looks like now we would be able to go over there and actually do a tour of Europe. We've always toured Canada extensively, of course. We're probably going to hit Mexico later this year and do a full tour of Mexico which sounds kind of funny, but it's possible. But I'm not positive about going to Europe until spring or summer next year.

Do you like touring?
I love it. I really do. It's my favorite thing about this business. I like being in the studio and I like touring. If I had to choose between the two, I'd choose the studio almost certainly, but it's fun. Especially now. It didn't used to be any fun because there was never anyone at the shows. It was just miserable, especially when we were touring by ourselves. But now our popularity is such that we can almost guarantee a reasonable audience every night with only a couple of exceptions. It's a lot easier to do when you have an audience. You get feedback and you get an adrenaline rush and it makes it quite enjoyable. Like I said, I get sick of playing some of the songs. "Not My God" I've played well over a thousand times, probably two thousand now, and I'm sick of it. I try to put fresh faces on the songs to keep them enjoyable. If I don't enjoy myself then the audience isn't going to enjoy themselves.

Any tour stories that stand out?
Millions of them. We tour so much more than your average band that it all kind of blends together. We go out for a year straight every time. I can't tell you how many times we've had a bus break down. A lot of our problems seem to stem around our buses. We had one driver...the bus broke down in the parking lot of a gas station and the driver went in to call his company to get a part sent out and while he was in their he hit on the girl that was with the attendant of the gas station and she called the cops and said they were going to take him to jail for sexual harassment. It was just a big mess. Needless to say, he wasn't our driver for long. A lot of incidents like that. We had one where we were driving from Vancouver, B.C., to Winnipeg and our bus broke down half-way through that trip in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, the opening band, Drill, their bus was right behind us. So they saw our bus break down and to us to our next show. We went three days riding in their bus. They had a much smaller bus than we did, so there was about fifteen people in a bus made for eight. We've had many problems like that, but it all seems to blend together after a while.

What is the current situation with TVT now?
Quite good actually. Everyone got their collective head out of their collective ass and we got on with business and everything seems to be working fine. I really have no complaints. The e-mailing campaign that we started, though I'm not supposed to say it, had its desired effect, that was our agreement. It did. Fuck it! I'll call a spade a spade. It was quite an interesting representation of the power of the internet. I've tried not to take the internet very seriously, simply because I've always considered it just a medium for moving information around in much the same way as a library is or the post office. Just faster. But it's weird because people aren't as afraid to express themselves the way they would be in a handwritten letter or talking face to face. People aren't afraid to say what they think.

With regards to the AC/DC tribute, were you contacted by Cleopatra or how did that work out?
Brian called me the morning...he actually, Brian McNelis, he's the guy that put that together...one morning we had just finished, I forget what we were doing, we were doing something at Warzone, we had just finished and I had an extra day and he called me that morning and asked me if I wanted to do it. I was like "funny you asked that..." So I asked him to fax me a list of the songs that were taken already and he did and all the good ones were done like "Back In Black," "Hells Bells" and "Highway to Hell," which didn't leave me much to choose and the only other one that I knew that wasn't taken was "TNT," which is kind of a silly song. I didn't have time, I had about four hours to do it by the time all was said and done. We just set up the band and played like a normal band would play in the studio. It's live, one take with two overdubs. So it ended up being Sister Machine Gun as live as you could possibly get. We don't normally do that, obviously. My music is heavily programmed. But that's basically the band setting up at Warzone and playing. Needless to say, it was fun. I had a good time.

I heard you were doing "Mama Said Knock You Out" on the last leg of this tour...
I've been doing it for quite a while. I always try to do a cover to spice things up a little bit and we try to make it as alien to our own music as possible. I always thought that was the best rap song ever written. It's really heavy, it totally encompasses what rap is all about and it had a melody line which most rap songs don't. So it made it easy to cover. It sounds funny if you haven't heard it, but it actually came out quite well. In the middle we did that Korn "Are you ready" song, I forgot the name of it, which was popular at that point instead of that breakdown that LL Cool J has, we did the beginning of the Korn song. It was quite funny actually. We always try to keep our covers kind of silly. I did "Eighties" for a while, not "Eighties, we are going to do that possibly, I don't know yet. Did "Paul Revere" for a long time by the Beastie Boys. "Paid In Full" by Eric B. and Rakim. It's always been a rap song. I'm going to try and get away from that. On this last little tour that we did we did "ComeTogether" by the Beatles and that was actually quite fun, although it's hard to do a Beatles' song justice since they are already quite good. There's really no point in covering them.

Do you basically just keep the cover songs live?
Normally. I don't like to record them. I recorded "Eighties," but I don't know if we'll put it on anything. I did it as a joke. I was trying to point something out to the record label that they were missing. It's actually quite good, so we might put it on as a B-side.

Have you done any outside production since you produced The Agression?
Oh, Jesus Christ, please don't say you like that album. I kind of had a little run-in with them. I'm not very fond of their whole situation. Yeah, I did a Pain Station record on Decibel, Anxiety, I believe that it is called. I did three songs on that. I did an Acumen remix, which I hate to say this, that was quite good. Their new record is actually really good. I normally don't like industrial music at all, but I really like what they did with this new record. Their thing is a little harder than mine, of course, but I quite like it.

Who makes Parker Fly guitars?
Korg owns them. I have an endorsement with Korg, which is why I play the Parkers. I put that in their (the album) just because I like them so much. People always ask me, because it's a strange looking guitar... They're made out of graphite instead of out of wood, so they're very light and I have back problems so I can't play heavy guitar on stage. These guitars only weigh about five pounds. I like the guitar so much, I really love it. People kept asking me what kind of guitar it was, so I thought I would just put it in the record to make it easy. Ironically I got an endorsement with Korg shortly there after. It was kind of funny how that worked out.

Jim Marcus is completely absent from helping out with this album.
I actually don't speak to him anymore. When Die Warzau broke up it was quite heavy and Jimmy, I really hate to say this, he made everyone choose sides. Everyone that was involved in the whole thing. He was like "either your my friend or your Van's friend, but you can't be both." He didn't say that, but his actions implied it. I chose Vandy. I don't know, it was just an uncomfortable situation for everybody. All over a woman, ironically. She wasn't all that to tell you the honest truth. Funny how things work out. So I haven't spoken to him in the better part of two years.

I'm sure Chris and his label disagree as to how to define Sister Machine Gun's music. I very much doubt that Chris would ever refer to SMG as an industrial band. What both sides could agree on is that Sister Machine Gun is a musical hybrid. A fusion of styles. This comes forth live as well. Chances are that SMG will be on the road somewhere while you are reading this article. And someday soon, they will be near you. So go check out Chris, Rich Deacon (bass), Brian Sarche (guitar), and Kevin Temple (drums) as they tear the roof off a club near you.