LABYRINTHIC AT WILL – ORGANIC AT HEART

If I had a dime for each time someone has asked me if I knew a certain band, and to which I answered ‘that I have heard a lot about the band itself, but never come so far as to actually listen to their music’... Man, I would have dimes enough to kill the afternoons in front of a Space Invaders arcade machine for the rest of the summer! Due to the bizarre and heterodox ring of their band name, and not least the highly hysterical hype that has surrounded their goings and doings right from the release of the self-titled debut, Dillinger Escape Plan were more than well-known to me – nominally speaking – before I was bestowed a late introduction to the schizoid cocktail of odder-than-odd time signatures and high-octane riff’n’hook vacillation that came in the form of the fan-favourite mutant “43% Burnt”. Yet, admiration did not turn into affection before their second full-length effort Miss Machine broke out of its cardboard sleeve and deflowered the last infinitesimal bit of virtue concealed somewhere inside of that tormented electronic device that I call a home stereo. Vocalist Greg Puciato called in one eventless autumn evening in 2004 for a chat about the ‘detail that makes it all click’, radio-friendliness (*gasp*), DVD shenanigans and the will to kill a producer…

# I understand that you are currently well underway with the opening US-tour?

“Yeah, we’re about three or four weeks in. We were in Phoenix, Arizona a couple of days ago, and it was probably 118 degrees over there. We’re in New Orleans right now, and it’s a bit more human over here.”

# How has everything been going so far?

“Great, man. You know, Miss Machine came out over here two weeks ago, and just the excitement of the album finally being out is taking the shows up to a new level. We’re also playing smaller clubs than we’ve been playing in the past, just to try and make it possible for people to see us in an environment that they haven’t seen us in for a while. So we play 300/400-capacity clubs instead of those larger venues, and that, in combination with the album coming out, just makes everything that more exciting for us.”

# There is a more intimate feeling in playing at these smaller venues?

“Yeah, definitely. It’s great, man. Like I said, for the past couple of tours we did, a lot of the venues had barricades in front of the stage and stuff like that. This time it’s just kids falling all over one another, you know? It feels great [laughs].”

# Judging from the DEP-interviews I have read that were conducted prior to the release of Miss Machine, there seems to be a common hunch in the band that the album would come to surprise the fans. What kind of feedback have you received from the audience thus far?

“It’s all been pretty awesome. I thought we would get a lot more negative feedback than we seem to be getting. I haven’t really heard much so far, and the stuff that I’m doing here doesn’t really bother me, you know. We made the album we wanted to make. We didn’t write this album for fans; we wrote it for ourselves. We really expected a lot of people to not quite get it, and the fact that a lot of people do seem to be getting it is really amazing for us. Even two days after the album came out, there were tons of kids in the crowd that knew every single word to every single song. We were just like: ‘Man, this is really crazy. Really insane.’ We had no idea what to expect, you know.”

# Some of the oldest material on Miss Machine dates back to right after the release of Calculating Infinity, which was released back in 1999. What has that meant for the songwriting as a whole?

“Well, we’re all really perfectionistic. We kind of don’t know when to finish a song. We keep working and working and working on it, and even if we think we’re done with a song, we’ll come back to it two months later and decide that we want to change a couple of parts. It worked out for the best this time, but there were some other points where we were about to change things for the worse [laughs]. It gets defective after a while, you know. When you’re writing songs and you don’t have anyone to tell you when to stop or keep you in check. You want to keep adding to the songs and writing on them. I’ve been changing lyrics every day up to the very day we started the recordings. On the very day we started the recordings I was changing lyrics because I thought I had lyrics that were better than the ones I already had. Ben [Weinman – guitars] would just be shaking his head, you know [laughs]. ‘What are you doing, man?!’ But I’d rather have it be like that than not care about the songs at all, especially knowing that we’re putting an album out after five years. I wanted every single part of every single song to be as good as it could possibly be, and I think it just comes down to us being perfectionists and not wanting to settle for less than we know we’re capable of.”

# Were you actually forced to trim down the amount of songwriting material in order for it to become an actual full-length album?

“Yeah, definitely. We didn’t use all the parts that we wrote. Ben will play guitar and come up with a few hours of material, and out of those few hours we might only use 30 seconds. We tape a lot that gets thrown away, and there are many riffs which, if a lot of other bands or a lot of other people heard them, they would probably go: ‘I can’t believe you’re throwing that out’ or ‘I can’t believe you’re not using that part’. Ben knows when he’s writing a song what he wants, and there are plenty of times where my reaction is: ‘Man, that riff is awesome! We have to use that.’ And he would answer: ‘No, it’s not right.’ Then I would kind of be annoyed with him for a few days, and then he’ll come up with another riff which destroys that first awesome riff. So I’ll just have to realise that’s how it works".

# The very first recordings for Miss Machine were laid down as early as in January 2003. What has it meant for the creative process that the recording sessions stretched over such an extensive amount of time?

“I think that by doing that, it allowed us to concentrate more on each individual song instead of going in and saying: ‘Okay, we have to record eleven songs all in one.’ It really allowed us to be fresh for every song. You start to get burned out after a while in the studio. It’s just like staying in a room that doesn’t have windows; you never know when it’s night or day, you know. You’re working on the same parts day by day for 16 consecutive hours. The fact that we did them three songs at a time made it feel more like we were recording three or four separate EP’s than it actually did recording an album. Because of that we could put so much more emphasis on each song, and we didn’t allow ourselves to get burned out. Each time we went into the studio, we were about each song. It wasn’t like: ‘Fuck, we’ve got eight more songs to record!’ So it was definitely better that way, I think.”

# Songs like “Unretrofied” and “Highway Robbery” – just to single out the most obvious examples – contain what I would describe as ‘hit potential’ with their accessible hooks and memorable vocal-lines. Can the mainstream scene essentially contain a band with as multiplex and unreliable a sound as The Dillinger Escape Plan?

“It’s really hard for us to tell, because we’re in it and our perspectives are so distorted at this point, you know. Our perspective on what is normal and what sounds weird is really not what normal people think. So even if “Unretrofied” and “Highway Robbery” sound pretty commercial to you, because the band that did those songs would never have thought of doing anything like that in the past, I still can’t imagine them being played on the radio. When I turn on the radio and hear the bands that are being played, I’m not really sure whether there would even be room now for bands that came out ten years ago and did well on the radio, like Tool, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against The Machine or Faith No More. I don’t think that bands like that would be allowed to be on the radio today. I think that mainstream radio today is in a much more constricted state than it was back then, and I don’t really know if we can get a foot in. But we’re going to do a video for one of those two songs and see how it does. Eventually, we want everybody in the world to hear our band. We don’t want to be a band that only a few people know about. We want to be a band that everybody has the chance to make up their minds about. Even if everyone who hears it thinks it sucks, I could at least say to myself that we got our music out to everybody. Like, if you form a band and your purpose is to change the way people think about music, you have to try and get it in front of everyone, which is exactly the point of us doing a System Of A Down tour or the point of us doing festivals like Reading and Leeds. Even if 99% of the people watching it hate our music, there might be one out of every hundred kids who thinks it awesome, and if it changes his way of thinking, maybe ten years from now that kid will write the most amazing record ever – who knows?”

# Would you describe The Dillinger Escape Plan as an outlet for creative impulses that the individual members of the band have to sort of get out of their systems?

“Yeah, that’s the way I feel, man. Even if no one cared for this band, I’d still think that we were pretty frustrated people creatively, in the sense that we have something to say, and we also really enjoy playing with one another. So I think that even if no one bought our albums, we would still be putting them out.”

# As a whole, the title of the album and its cover seem to suggest that there is a sort of ‘man vs. machine’ concept to the record. Is that the case?

“Well, the machine concept is not so much a literal one. It’s more in the sense of the machine being a kind of confine or a constraint in your life; not an actual machine. For me, personally, when I was writing lyrics this time, I was going through a relationship that to me felt pretty constricting – and should not have been. It should have been a positive situation, and because of touring and everything I wasn’t able to put time into it and we were growing apart. In that way a relationship becomes more of a confine than something which you actually enjoy. I came up with the term ‘miss machine’ to kind of represent something that seems to be appealing or alluring but ends up turning into being a constraint of some sort. We realised you can really apply that to anything: you can apply it to your job or your role in society or so many different things. We really felt strongly about that feeling of having put yourself in a situation that you don’t know how to handle.”

# You’ve worked together with Steve Evetts for all your official recordings so far. Could you perhaps give me a few words on how your collaboration with him has evolved throughout the years as well as coment on his specific input on Miss Machine?

“Steve Evetts is really important to us because he’s the only one who knows us from the beginning. He’s almost like a member of the band that isn’t there all the time, you know. Then we get into the studio and he knows exactly what we’re thinking, like when we say to him: ‘This part should sound like that’. When we have tried to explain it to someone else, they had no idea what we were talking about. We can talk to him like we’re talking to one another because he’s known us for so long. He knows exactly what we’re talking about. He hears things the same way as we do, which is really important when you’re editing, like ‘Hey, I want to go back to that part where it goes dan-dada-dan-dada.’ If we have a crazy part in a song, he would know exactly which one we were talking about. If there were a buddy who was normally used to working with bands that strictly do 4/4 timing and have typical song structures, it would take so long. And on top of that he’s a slave driver, man. He won’t settle for anything less than he knows you’re capable of; even if he thinks that you just got ‘the perfect take’. He made me sing the word ‘the’ in a certain song 75 times [laughs]. He would tell me: ‘Say that word again.’ I would do exactly the same, and he would say: ‘Do it again.’ It got to the point where I wanted to kill him. I actually hated his guts for a few days at a time, but looking back on it everything fell out the way it should, and when that particular take came he said: ‘Okay, that’s the one.’ At that particular time I might not have been able to tell that take from number one. It felt like it all sounded the same to me. After you have done about 60 takes of one fucking word, you can’t tell the difference anymore. He knows what makes certain takes special, and that’s really important to us.”

# Brian Montouri is the man behind the artwork for Miss Machine, but I read in an interview that the band had another artist assigned to work on a cover meanwhile. What did that other person have to offer?

“Well, like you said we originally had an entirely different cover, and it really looks completely different. We didn’t tell him or Brian what to do; we pretty much gave them free licence to do whatever they wanted. We liked the cover that we got from the other guy, but we weren’t blown away by it, if you know what I mean. Our reaction was something like: ‘Hey, this is cool. We won’t have a problem using this as a cover, but we’re not really excited.’ If we had to use it, we wouldn’t have been unhappy. But, like I said, after five years without having put an album out, we want to love everything about it. Brian Montouri is another person who has known us for five or six years or so, and he’s always got a lot of crazy ideas. He’s a visual artist in New York, and he’s always got great ideas, but he never really pens them out, so to speak. Like, he always has a cool idea for a t-shirt and it sounds great to us, but then he always does it in a way that was not quite like what we expected it to be. Nevertheless, his ideas are always great. We only had two weeks left before the artwork had to be turned in, and we only had Brian to tell us: ‘I swear to you it’s going to be awesome!’ He took off work and didn’t sleep for two straight weeks to get this done, and after those two weeks he turned in the whole thing with the cover, the layout and the whole thing – and we were fucking blown away. We had never seen anything like that before. It’s so original, man! I know a lot of people are kind of put off by it. The artwork caused a lot of people to react like: ‘What is this? It’s lame. It doesn’t look like a Dillinger album.’ But to us that’s exactly what we wanted: to feel the same way about it as we feel about the music. Something unusual. You can’t see our cover and the artwork on it without having a reaction. And that’s great. You have to look at it and think: ‘What the fuck?!’ That’s what we want.”

# The material on Miss Machine is here and there augmented by different sound effects, keyboards and synthesizers. Do you strive to recreate that soundscape in a live environment, or does such a setting rather call for another translation of the material, so to speak?

“Well, we try to. We started using that stuff on Irony Is a Dead Scene. This album has a lot more of it, for sure, and Chris [Pennie – drums] is basically the one who programs all that stuff for the album. He’s got a few samplers, triggers, certain sequencers and things like that behind his drumkit, so we try to recreate as much of it as possible, but obviously you can’t do every little thing. We try to take the parts that we feel are integral to the new songs and make sure they’re in there, you know.”

# Dillinger Escape Plan are without question one of the most important bands on Relapse Records. If I say that the band have had and still have a notable influence on how the press and music listeners look upon Relapse as a music institution, what would your comments be to that?

“I think that’s incredible, man. I think that’s great because people generally think of Relapse in terms of death metal and so on. Really extreme music that no one except for a select few would be able to listen to. People can’t handle that kind of stuff, you know. It’s actually really flattering to hear such a perspective on it. Relapse and Dillinger are helping one another in getting to a point where neither of us have been before. We’ve never been bigger than we are, and we never expected to get this big at all. Relapse is becoming the label that Roadrunner was 10 or 15 years back. They are now starting to get respect from bigger publications and record stores, whereas in the past people would just write Relapse off as a fucking death metal label. The fact that Rolling Stone over here have featured a band that’s on Relapse Records is insane and unheard of. It’s amazing and it means that we are accomplishing what we set out to do: to change the way mainstream people view music and to change what they think of as acceptable. If a publication like Rolling Stone can review Dillinger Escape Plan, even if it wasn’t a great review, is an amazing thing.”

# The deluxe edition of Miss Machine comes with a special DVD including eight live tracks and some studio tomfoolery. Could you perhaps lead me into some of the finer points of that DVD?

“Well, the live aspect is something that’s really important to us, and we don’t feel that people can really understand what this band is about unless they have a picture inside their head of how we are live. Even if we tried to show that through the inclusion of live tracks, as you mentioned, from different parts of the world, I still don’t think that it really captures the feeling of being there. But at least it gives a glimpse of it. It’s kind of like seeing us at a festival or something. It’s not really the same as being at one of our own shows, but at least you kind of get the vibe. The live aspect of our band is something that feels extremely important. When you think of this band after you’ve seen us live, it’s completely different from what you thought of us before that.”

# What was the basic motivation behind providing an inside look into The Dillinger Escape Plan with the documentary part of the DVD?

“Next time we want to do a lot more. We wanted it to be a lot longer, actually. About an hour long or so. We didn’t have very much footage of anything else but just us fucking around [laughs]. We wanted to record a lot of the making of the album, but a lot of times I didn’t really want Ben to record me while I was singing, because you will inevitably be very conscious of that, you know. And Ben felt the same way with the camera around. We didn’t get as much studio footage as we would have liked to have, and all the footage ended up being us fucking around. But at least it shows that we have a sense of humour, and that we’re not super serious about ourselves. We’re serious about our music but we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”

# So a full-length DVD from The Dillinger Escape Plan in the near future is a feasible image?

“Yeah, actually our Relapse contract right now calls for us to make two, so we’re filming pretty much everything on tour. We’re taking video cameras with us on every tour and filming tons of stuff. We don’t know exactly how we want to it, but we would like to put out a DVD with a documentary of the band spanning the whole history, interviewing people from the past like Dimitri [Minakakis – former vocalist] and Adam [Doll – former bassist], band members’ parents and just the people being in the band, of course – all kinds of crazy shit, you know. Just so people can get a perspective on the history of the band, because we have such a bizarre history. Our original bass-player, Adam, is paralysed [due to a serious car accident – Misereion], which brought along some of these member changes. We want more people to know about that stuff. And then we want the other DVD to be pretty much live footage from all the touring that is going on right now after the release of Miss Machine. We’re already got tons of footage from this tour and from Europe where we’ve just been. You just have to keep filming. Fortunately, it’s really easy and convenient now that everybody has digital cameras and so on to record stuff like that.”

# Well, that was about it for me. Thanks a lot, Greg!

“Thanks for your patience and continued support of The Dillinger Escape Plan, man. Hope to catch you live on tour...”
 

Conducted and written by Misereion.