*INTERVIEW FEATURE*

STARSANDHEROES talks to KAOS from GHOST CAULDRON

It’s fair to say, in the course of any given year, one encounters a considerable amount of terrible music. Dull, unimaginative, lazy, and sometimes just plain unforgivably awful albums hit the shelves every week, and no amount of hopeful PR-led flannel can hide the sad fact that, shorn of pretty pictures on the sleeve and burbling hyperbole in the press, a dud is a dud is a dud - plain to hear the moment the needle hits the record, the laser makes first contact with the CD or the MP3 rolls around on your player of choice. Some turds you just can’t polish.

This sad fact – and don’t let anybody tell you it isn’t a fact, they’re either lying, deaf or deluded – follows music fans around whether they like it or not, grabbing at their ankles and screaming, “Admit it! It was shit all along! You got sucked in!” And it’s all the more disheartening when you just know there’s some breathtaking new music being made, somewhere out of earshot, but you just…can’t…reach it. Yet.

Why the rambling monologue? Because a genuinely exciting record has just genuinely excited this correspondent, is why. The record is called Invent Modest Fires, it’s by an act I’d never previously heard of called Ghost Cauldron, and it’s right up there with DJ Shadow’s The Private Press, with RJD2’s Deadringer, with Gonzales’s Presidential Suite as a prime example of what happens when an artist is allowed to let his over-fertile imagination run absolutely riot across 70 minutes. Undie hip-hop meets shoegazing guitar soundscapology, lush vocals rub shoulders with crackling electro pulses, a light bulb flicks on as MCs emerge from the noise to brand their personality onto Invent Modest Fires - already a strong contender for album of the year, and it’s only May.

One question remains: who is responsible for this remarkable album? I picked up the phone to find out. His name is Kaos, you may already know him as one third of Berlin-based squigglers Terranova, and as it happens, he doesn’t seem all that interested in talking about his newest creation at all. I only asked him how he was, and this is what happened:

“I was in London last week DJing, and I spoke to this guy from this super-big music magazine, and I asked him, ‘What’s going on at the moment? What do you guys like?’ and he was like, ‘We like a lot of German techno, and lots of music from America, from New York, The DFA are fantastic’ – how boring, everybody knows it anyway – so I ask him ‘What’s happening in England, what’s going on?’ and he was getting so embarrassed because nothing’s really going down in England…”

Here speaks a man with a passion for music bordering on the pathological, and he’s not going to let anybody ignore him - least of all, me. The English press goes in for a further righteous battering: “[UK journalists] don’t know what to hype! You know how London works, it’s just about hype, and at the moment they just hype things up that are not good. You know this new record, ‘Zongamin’? It’s this new thing everybody’s into, like, press is going crazy – I listened to the record, it’s fucking terrible!”

“It’s really cool here in Berlin at the moment – bars and clubs are really packed, for example two days ago Erol [Alkan, from pioneering London electropunk club Trash] played in Berlin at this club called Cookies, 2000 people on a Tuesday night, partying til like seven in the morning…there’s a really good energy at the moment in Berlin, you know?”

As you can tell, Kaos is extremely fond of the city in which he was born and grew up, so much so that it crosses my mind to contact the German tourist board to recommend they stick him on their payroll for the foreseeable future. That said, he lived in London for a while in the mid-‘90s and happily acknowledges that had he not done so, “I wouldn’t do music now. I lived with [currently much sought-after überpop producer] Cameron McVeigh – I was hanging out in his studio and making tea for all these cool people…”

And is that how you started Terranova? “Terranova started as a DJ collective,” Kaos explains, still inexplicably breathless. “We were the first DJs in Berlin playing eclectic DJ sets…” Aha! This perhaps explains why Invent Modest Fires sounds less like the work of one single-minded artist, and more like a seamless compilation of ridiculously disparate tunes, devised in the never-sleeping hive mind of a tireless multi-personality dilettante.

“When it comes to DJing, for me [an open mind] is very important. I play lots of upbeat, fast early techno, Detroit stuff, Carl Craig, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson stuff…when I stopped listening to hip-hop, late ‘90s, I got really into stuff like that, I was like, ‘That’s the future’. I collect shitloads of records – I have a huge record collection – all kinds of stuff, hip-hop, techno, house, old music, wha’ever!” Kaos says this last word a lot, with a glottal-stopped East London accent at semi-comical odds with his otherwise clipped Teutonic tones.

“I’m doing this [DJing] now for six or seven years, and I just realized, when you play club in Spain or France, Germany, wha’ever, people want to be entertained. It’s a fact. If you play too weirdo abstract shit all night, people don’t have a good time.” You mean it sounds good but people can’t dance to it? “Exactly! To be honest I’m not into stuff like Layo & Bushwacka, for example - I could never imagine I’d play stuff like that - but then you hear a song like ‘Love Story’ and it’s amazing! So why not play it out? It fucking rocks and it’s a good tune.”

This egalitarian approach to DJing has only come to Kaos recently, however. He does admit to a trainspottery, label snob’s past, to whit: “I must say that three, four years ago I was so into my music, ‘ahhh, no, I have to play the latest Mo’Wax, this Shadow and the new Carl Craig’, I was like that, you know? But I’ve changed and become more open-minded – it’s important that you have an open mind when it comes to making music and DJing…”

And finally, praise be, Kaos actually mentions the album. “I wanted to do a record that is not a DJ record; I wanted to show the other side of Ghost Cauldron. This record is more inspired by film music, like ‘Midnight Vapor’ is inspired by [Giorgio Moroder’s 1978 classic soundtrack] Midnight Express.” To these ears it sounds like DJ Shadow. “It’s good that you say that, I like Shadow a lot. The first show he played in Berlin, with DJ Krush, we played it together!” I can almost hear his chest swelling with the pride of a true fan. “I like the raw side of Shadow, the way he samples. We record in the same way – all the songs were sampled loops, vibes, ideas, we sampled lots of moments out of old records, obscure weird twisted rock – we wanted to dig in different crates, you know?”

We know. And having exhausted himself DJing, finishing the album, snowboarding and letting his hair down - “I party like a pig, you know, I go crazy” - til the beginning of 2003, Kaos was “totally fucked, out of energy” and happy to take a breather once Invent Modest Fires had been completed. The former semi-pro skater - “I just got me a new Mark Gonzales board, but I don’t have time at the moment to skate” - is now singing the praises of Timbaland’s work with Justin Timberlake (the former, apparently, is “the fucking don!”), meeting hip-hop legend Prince Paul in Miami – “He scared the shit out of me!” – and enthusing about the possibility of a skate-themed video for the album’s next single ‘See What I’ve Become’/‘Death Before Disco’.

I look at my handset to check it hasn’t ignited with all this talk of cauldrons and fires; it hasn’t.

GHOST CAULDRON’s INVENT MODEST FIRES album is released through !K7 Records on 12th May 2003. KAOS will be DJing in Australia with Patrick Pulsinger in July.

Originally published in Sydney's 3D World magazine April 2003

*INTERVIEW FEATURE*

STARSANDHEROES talks to GOLDFRAPP’s Will Gregory

The last time Goldfrapp troubled the international psyche was the release of “Pilots”, the third single from their splendid Felt Mountain album, at the tail end of 2001. Since then, at least on the evidence of new LP Black Cherry, the idiosyncratic English duo (Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory, vocals/synth and pretty much everything else, respectively) has undergone something of a transformation. While there are certain nods to the lush orchestration and jaw-dropping vocal acrobatics familiar to Felt Mountain’s half million owners, the majority of Black Cherry is harder, grubbier and dipping deeper into dark 70s electro/disco territory – a development that makes this correspondent very happy indeed.

On the phone from his West Country hometown of Bath, Will compares the two albums: “I can see that it’s gonna confuse some people because we’ve shifted ground. The electronic stuff and the drums have come to the front, and we’ve turned it all up. Also, we did approach it quite differently: we jammed a lot more, Alison and I, on synths, and those accidents that you get when you’re jamming actually turned into basslines. You’ve got this much rougher approach to the instrumentation - straight away it’s much more dirty and alive.”

Is the change a result of playing live a lot and realizing what works live and what doesn’t?

“I think that’s true. Obviously Felt Mountain was done as a studio fantasy, and the reality of gigging it did bring home some hard truths. We never expected to be playing it live, not while we were [recording] it – I didn’t even know Alison could perform live, cos I’d never seen her do it! It was all a bit of a shock, but she’s great, she’s a fantastic performer. When we came to do this record, it was in the back of our minds a bit more, about how the whole thing would go as a set, and what would be fun to do – have fun for ourselves a bit, and kinda defrost after Felt Mountain which we’d kinda frozen ourselves with a bit after a year and a half of gigging it.”

Were you very surprised that Felt Mountain had such an effect on everyone?

“Yeah, we were - it’s like telling somebody your dream, isn’t it? That’s the most boring thing you can do to anybody! And immediately you can see the eyes glaze…it’s a bit like that. We just did it for ourselves, and to think that other people had similarly twisted music sensibilities was a shock actually.”

So what prompted Black Cherry’s upward gearshift?

“When you’re writing, you’ve got to set up some sort of tension for yourself to stimulate yourself, otherwise you can just go to sleep, get lazy. If you make things a little bit uncomfortable for yourself by denying yourself some familiar scaffolding that you use, then that’s probably a good thing. It’s a bit scary but it makes for an interesting life…”

It sounds like you came straight off the Felt Mountain tour and went straight into the studio – how long did the new album take?

“It took exactly a year, more or less. 7th January 2002, start album, 7th January 2003, start rehearsing for live show! I think we’re coming to Australia in August, and we really want to go. You’re in which city? Sydney? Oh, fantastic – I’m absolutely dying to go. [cue much excited chatter from Will about Australia, and some much-needed sympathy on account of your correspondent’s imminent visa-based departure]”

Anyway, back to the record. I’m gonna say a word to you, to see how you react: Electroclash…

“[Sharp intake of breath] Well, the thing is, I don’t think we knew what it was until somebody said, ‘oh, this sounds very electroclash’. Daniel Miller [Mute Records owner and, as The Normal, creator of ‘70s electro classic “Warm Leatherette”] kept trying to find another word to invent for it…the only thing I worry about a little bit with Electroclash is that it’s a kind of ‘80s throwback, and we’re not – is Giorgio Moroder Electroclash? We’re closer to the daddies, I think, like Kraftwerk and that ‘70s stuff.”

You’ve never been shy about your love of disco, not so evident on Felt Mountain but much more obvious on new tracks like “Strict Machine” [a robo-disco homage to Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”].

“Felt Mountain had very slow disco, y’know, like “Pilots” – you can bump’n’grind to that, you just have to do it very very slowly…[cackles like a madman] I think we did realise we needed to speed it up a little bit, and “Strict Machine” was the result of that.”

I saw the Felt Mountain tour at London’s ULU in 2001 and witnessed people standing literally open-mouthed, blown away by Alison’s awe-inspiring vocals. Do you think the new material will have the same effect, now she’s narrowed down the three-octave histrionics?

“Actually, for us it was broadening it - up until [the new album] we hadn’t tracked a vocal or done harmonies, so for us it was actually broadening out the range of what she could do. And in terms of her range, she’s still really pushing herself – on a song like “Tiptoe”, all those low vocals at the beginning, that’s all her.”

It’s the high vocals that knock people out though isn’t it?

“Yeah, and then she has to do “Utopia” at the end of the set, so…I think the whole thing is broadening the base from which we can write. I think some people are gonna think they’ve been ripped off cos they wanted Felt Mountain II or something, but…”

That’s a good point actually – how do you think the fans are going to react?

“We did another gig at ULU in March, and it was definitely the fans that came because it sold out very quickly, and they were a little bit baffled to begin with. But we did “Hairy Trees” and that was the turning point – once we’d done that, everyone kind of got where we were coming from and when we revved it up into “Crystalline Green” and “Train” they were right with it.”

“I think people generally like a large range of music: their taste always was pretty broad. I think that with most people, if you rifle through their records, you’ll find something you’d never expect. I think that actually, audiences are much more flexible than we give them credit for.”

How would you feel if you went to someone’s house and found a Goldfrapp album filed next to Dido? Would you think, “oh god, is that the sort of people we’re selling records to?”

“[more mad cackling] Well this is the great thing – you can’t be like that! If you have that attitude then you’re being sucked in to that whole marketing idea – the wonderful thing is that everybody who listens to [Black Cherry] will have a different favourite track.”

On first listen it didn’t sound like Goldfrapp at all but I liked it, and by the second spin it did sound like Goldfrapp and I liked it even more…

“Well that’s true though - when I listen to a record, I change how I feel about it, and very often the records I started by being underwhelmed by, I end up playing more than anything else. But sometimes you instantly love something and you don’t need to play it anymore, cos you’ve got it! You’ve been there, that’s it: that’s how I felt when I heard Portishead the first time, I was totally bowled over by it, I thought it was incredible. But, in a way, I didn’t need to play it over and over again, there it is in my head, I didn’t need to.”

“I think all these things work very differently, which is why it’s very hard when you’re writing cos you feel the same way about your own music – y’know, one minute you’re really up about it, ‘oh this is great’, then the next minute you think, ‘you know what? I don’t want to hear that again!’”

Having played Felt Mountain live for 18 months, are you bored of it?

“I think we probably need a break from it. At the time, lots of lovely journalists were saying, “oh, the great thing about that record is it’s timeless”, but things date don’t they, they just do, and the things that you wouldn’t predict – I think some of Felt Mountain has dated for me.”

It’s normally the beats, not the vocals, that date a record – were you conscious when you made Black Cherry that maybe in five years’ time you might be “oh, it’s so 2003”?

“Oh yeah! You just can’t predict, you just don’t know. I think what you’ve got to worry about is that it doesn’t sound dated immediately! That’s all you can really deal with.”

You weren’t tempted to go 2-step garage then?

“Erm, no - especially cos I don’t know what it is! We’re very uneducated about rhythm, and that was part of the thing for us to get over. I’m awful; I don’t listen to any other contemporary music, and I think that it’s a mistake, really. There’s that thing of being blissfully unaware isn’t there, and therefore when you do what you want to do, you’re not worried whether Justin Timberlake’s done it or something.”

So you don’t check whose albums are out at the same time as yours, to see what it’s up against?

“Not really - but what you do do, is worry that someone’s gonna release your album before you do! You know how ideas tend to pop up simultaneously in different places? [You worry] that somebody will have coincidentally just “discovered” your album and then made it. That’s probably paranoia taken to a certain extreme, though!”

Black Cherry doesn’t play on the Xbox in my house – how do you feel about the new Copy Protection technology? Do you download music?

“You can’t deny the progress of technology, can you? You can’t just put your head in the sand and say ‘ooh, they shouldn’t be doing that, I’m jolly well annoyed about MP3s’ – that doesn’t work. The record companies have been pretty slow off the mark – they need to just wake up to the reality of what’s going on and deal with it. I think DVDs are copy protected aren’t they?”

“I don’t [download music] but not because I wouldn’t, it’s just that I don’t know how to do it – everybody will do something if they can, if they’ve got the opportunity – if you don’t want them to you’ve got to do something about it yourself. I think people will always just be one step ahead, won’t they?”

You never considered doing what Madonna did, putting dummy tracks on the Internet saying “What the fuck are you doing?” instead of the track?

“[raucous laughter] You can try, but you can’t beat it – you can just maybe be a bit more vigilant than [record companies] have been. They’re gonna go out of business unless they do, and if they do, then that says something about the technology and the revolution…maybe we don’t need record companies!”

You’re lucky being on Mute though, they’re on side aren’t they? In fact, I downloaded my favourite Goldfrapp track, the Mick Harvey remix of “Utopia”, from www.mute.com.

“Oh, tell me about it! We love ‘em. They let us do whatever crazy thing we want to do, and sometimes they even smile when we’re doing it!”

One final question before the scary robot phone lady cuts us off: You composed the score for fantastic British football hooligan movie ID – have you been asked to do any more soundtracks?

“Well, I think they were gonna make a sequel to ID, where he was deep into bad boy National Front [infamous British far-right organization] territory, but then they suddenly realised that actually they didn’t want to promote the National Front that much [cackle]. So they cancelled it, which was a bit of a shame cos I’d love to have done another one. We’ve since been offered stuff singly and together, and I think we’d really like to do one together. We’ve had tracks on films, but we’d really like to score something – I think that’d be more fun.”

So there we have it. The all-new Goldfrapp: more dark, more dirt, more disco, but above all, a whole load more fun.

Originally published in 3D World Magazine, April 2003

Beans - He Don't Use Jelly

--------------------

A cheery "G’day!" hits my ear down the phone from New York, and for a second I’m convinced the chap on the line is an out-of-town Aussie playing silly buggers. But no, it’s Beans, former Antipop Consortium rapper, known round some parts as Mr One Stripe Red on account of his crimson mohawk, and apparently partial to a chinwag – even when it’s revealed that I’m not Australian at all.

Beans’s debut solo album is called Tomorrow Right Now, and it’s as different as you could imagine from the old Antipop blueprint: dark, experimental, challenging, thought-provoking and sometimes downright scary. But I think it’s best to let Beans explain himself, since he’s so good at it – let the Q&A commence…

Antipop Consortium broke up unexpectedly after the release of 2002’s acclaimed Arrhythmia album – what happened?
They hate me, man! You get to a point…we were all individuals who worked together collectively, but as we got older, we still had individual things that you can’t say, that they needed to say on their own. That’s essentially what it boils down to. There’s always a conflict of ego when you’re dealing with humans. But at the end of the day, they [other AP MCs M.Sayyid and Priest] had a different aesthetic, and…I’m not the easiest person to work with, so I’m told. I don’t know what they’re doing now.

Can you elaborate on the idea of the "too many MCs and not enough listeners" line from Tomorrow Right Now’s centrepoint, "Crave"?
I think the statement’s kinda self-explanatory, but at the same time, just looking at the climate…not to say anything on a high horse or whatever, but I’m just coming to the realization that this [hip-hop] is not for everybody. Not everybody is an artist, we still need doctors and lawyers as well. I’m really pretty lucky to have the opportunity, the privilege to create records - a lot of people come into it and they don’t have an agenda, they just want to rhyme, or they can rhyme, but there’s more to it than just being able to rhyme and battle - "Because you built a model, doesn’t make you a mechanic" [a quote from album opener "Roar"].

You write poetry as well as performing…
The only distinction is cadence, y’know? That’s how Antipop all met, on the poetry scene. We all met under that umbrella – we came from hip-hop backgrounds and did poetry, and it opened me up to try and express myself differently.

The album strikes me as very honest, sometimes brutally so – I’m thinking of a track like "Booga Sugar" [an a capella slice of narcotic poetry].
I try to be honest. "Booga Sugar" is based on personal experiences – I wasn’t a crackhead, but I used to smoke a lot of weed, and I was working at a homeless shelter at the time, and it got to the point where people started to worry about me. So I thought, what would happen if this went to the next level? That’s one of the older pieces on the album, one I used to do in ’93.

Do you find you need the control gained by producing your own material?
Yeah, I produced most of the new album myself, working with various engineers. I never really [produced] tracks for Antipop. The only Antipop track I did, that ever came out was "Ghostlawns", where I did the drums; and even on Arrhythmia, I didn’t even do a solo track, cos I wanted to save all my solo stuff for this album!

Did the rest of Anti-Pop realize that?
Yeah, they did - I mean, that was part of the problem. Earl Blaize did a track and I just rhymed on it, and that’s how [Arrhythmia highlight] "Silver Heat" happened. I hung onto my best lyrics, cos I was more focused on my own shit.

Perhaps unusually for a hip-hop album, tracks like "Sickle Cell Hysteria" and "Rose Periwinkle Plum" are dark techno-esque instrumentals, with just you going freestyle crazy in the studio – did you agonise over including them?
Yeah, that’s just me soloing over the drums – "Rose Periwinkle Plum" was a definite [for the album], "Sickle Cell" I went back and forth with. I wasn’t sure about putting it on the album, but I liked it, so fuck it! It had a rap originally, but I thought the lyrics that I had would just be too much with the beat – they were really sparse but I just always liked the beat better without the lyrics.

Do you have a strong work ethic?
Yeah I work hard. I know what I need to do to guarantee somewhat of a success, to enable me to make music on my own terms, without concession - I know what needs to be done. But that’s the whole appeal of being on a label like this [UK-based IDM pioneers Warp – the label signed APC in 1998 as their first hip-hop act], they don’t put any constraints. They didn’t have to worry about this album, because I kinda gave it to ‘em! They’d heard the demos but they thought it was gonna be a different record than what they’d heard – they were surprised, so it was cool.

An unorthodox, non hip-hop image seems to be very important to you, from well-cut suits to outsized sunglasses - have you still got your crazy hair?
You mean the Mohawk? Yeah, I still got it – it’s a trademark now, I can’t cut it off! Trust me, it’s a conscious decision, it’s just part of my state, y’know, a placement of how I perceive myself. [Image] is definitely important, it’s the music business! That’s what people grab hold of, what they see first is your image, and decide whether or not your image is enough to buy the record.

But with the continuing rise in the popularity of filesharing, all marketing and image ideas go out of the window – where do you stand with ripping and burning?
It’s not healthy for the industry at all, not if the artist can’t make money from it. That’s where I stand - it’s just digital bootlegs. The artist may not be making money from bootlegs, unless the artist is bootlegging it, which I think probably happens. I mean c’mon now, half those major label hip-hop cats were drug dealers! And now they’re making records…I hear their records, I hear what they’re saying, you think not?

If a major label offered to double your deal with Warp, would you take it?
I don’t know if that would be in my best interests, because they wouldn’t know how to market me. I’d only do it if I did a certain amount of records on an independent label…I’d do it how Sonic Youth did it - you know how they put out a series of independent releases and then sold all their back catalogue, and they just brought their fans with them. It’s just a matter of timing really. My aspiration is more for autonomy - I just want to be famous doing what I’m doing – but fame is fleeting though, so it’s not an objective.

Thanks for your time – look after yourself…
I have no choice.

And on that sanguine note, he’s off with a click and a buzz. But never fear! Beans has left us with Tomorrow Right Now, a remarkable record and perhaps the most eloquent crystallization yet of the 2003 collective Warp Records aesthetic. And hell, he’s pleased with this genre-busting combination of glitch-laden electronics, Green Velveteen horrorcore techno and Beans’s inimitable, effortlessly poetic drawl; maybe you will be too.

BEANS’S album TOMORROW RIGHT NOW is out now through WARP RECORDS.

This Q&A was originally published in 3D World Magazine, April 2003

*INTERVIEW*

A couple of months back, in conjunction with his arrival in Australia for a handful of (inexplicably poorly attended) shows, STARSANDHEROES had the opportunity to interview Keigo Oyamada aka Cornelius. One of those acts who really makes our blood flow that little bit faster, we were chuffed to bits finally to get the chance to talk to the man - sadly our previous attempt, back on December 2001 on behalf of a now-defunct TV station/website venture, fell by the wayside when the venture closed down early 2002.

But once again, our efforts were scuppered by various breakdowns in communication, and the original phone interview - with interpreter, since Keigo's English is a little sketchy - transmogrified into an email Q&A. Not nearly as exciting, I'm sure you'll agree, but it had to suffice.

As a further twist in our "we'll never get a successful Cornelius interview, ever" saga, Keigo's replies didn't reach our inbox til after the deadline of the magazine for which I was writing the feature...which is why I'm just gonna publish it here instead.

Are you looking forward to coming to Australia?
Yes! And it's my first time to go there.

Please could you describe the Cornelius live experience for the people who've never seen you before? (nb. this is not a yes or no answer!)
Basically, it's a rock band set-up with 4 members... bass player, drums, keyboards and guitar. We have a visual projection on a screen and various lights. The 3 of these synchronize together as part of the show.

With all your reckless combinations of different genres - country and drum'n'bass, 60s pop and breakbeat, heavy metal and easy listening - do you ever get confused?

Where would you ideally like to find Cornelius albums filed in a record shop?
Anywhere. And that's fine.

Who originally inspired you to make music? and who inspires you now?
I can't really say "who", but many bands/musicians.

Is there anybody you haven't yet worked with, who you'd like to?
There's so many people that I would like to work with that it may take me a few days to answer this question... but, many.

How do you pick a collaborator? Is a deep love of all things Brian Wilson essential?

What’s the most appropriate environment for listening to Cornelius?
Any kind of environment is fine, whether it'd be at home, on headphones walking in the street, big speakers etc...

How do you feel when you're onstage playing the Theremin?
I don't play the Theremin...I have the audience play the Theremin on stage...

Do you think Elvis would approve of your take on "Love Me Tender"?
I don't know...
It's actually the audiences version since the audience plays it...

Can you ever imagine getting bored of music? what would you do instead?
I don't think I'll get bored of music.

If "Point" and "Fantasma" were films, which films would they be?
I don't know but... I would be happy if it was used in Koyanisquasti.

What wakes you up in the morning?
My son.

What happened to Flipper's Guitar? Do you still like them?
The band came to an end over 10 yrs ago. It's not that I like or don't like FG, but I was young.

If you could keep one record, one book and one foodstuff but lose everything else, what would they be?
That's a very difficult question since there's too many that I like.

Is everything pop to you? and is pop everything?

How would you feel if one of your fans got a Trattoria tattoo?
I'll feel bad...

hat do you listen to at home?
Not much...

What’s the best record ever made?

anything else to add?


Wasn't really all that interested in answering much, was he? Ah well. We've left the unanswered questions in there for a little context, just in case anybody's interested. Hmmm. Back to the drawing board, methinks - some of those questions were, ummm, questionable...

And as a final addendum, the video for Cornelius's new single "I Hate Hate" is available here, along with oodles of other crazy soundmesh genius squiggling.