For Blow you were on the other side of the fence. Did you say, "Okay, you get the vocals from this track and you get the instrumentation from this track," or did you offer them anything they wanted?

J.G.: It really depended on how the artist worked. First of all, I had to track them down. If I didn't know them, I had to introduce myself. [Laughs] Cajole them. Find out what their schedule was like and then it was a matter of finding out what technology they used. Everyone worked in really different ways. Panacea, for example, works pretty much from a drum machine -- by putting sounds into a drum machine -- and so he'd say, "I want the vocal, I want this sound, that sound." I made a separate remix kit for each person. If someone was working in Pro Tools, I'd separate the tracks into that; if someone worked in Logic, I'd send them a Logic file or the individual audio files. For example, Franz Treichler started working a piece and he sent me the backing track. He said, "I don't think the vocals are working; can you re-record the vocals to this?" It was a completely different tempo and required a totally different delivery, so I redid the vocals and sent him that. It slowly built up like that. I think Amon Tobin just used a couple of little pieces -- some vocals and some horn samples, stuff like that. Jay Wasco took segments and rearranged them for string quartet and piano. That was really interesting.

Your material spans a whole range of genres in the first place. Were you looking for people outside your realm to do the remixes or people who were going to make massive different sounds?

J.G.: Actually, I was looking for people whose work I respect -- whose work I liked -- who I thought could take my music into interesting areas. I really wanted to see what they would do, what would happen to my music once it had been taken through their process and their mangler. Also, by the time it came out, I think it also said something about what their conception of me was. There was a reason that I, for example, chose the song "Shun" for Kid606, because it is a bit more of a pop song -- the tempo of it, stuff like that. There are any number of reasons why I chose a certain song for a certain person. Like Jay Wasco, for example. I've been aware of his stuff for a number of years. He has this band, Johnny Skilsaw, who had unsuccessful relationships with, like, Atlantic and did these incredible albums that just got buried, disappeared. They never even came out, in fact. I think he's this underappreciated -- I don't know -- genius, and he's toiling away in Connecticut. I was thrilled with what came out of that.

Now that it is all said and done, do you think that some of the sounds and genres heard on Blow will influence Foetus in the future? Like, "Wow, I've never really trafficked in drum 'n' bass and there's some cool shit there."

J.G.: [Laughs] Well... [deadpan] That wasn't the first time I have heard drum 'n' bass.

Uh, right, yeah. But in the sense of having your material put through that blender.

J.G.: Well, I am aware of what is going on. I don't try to listen and reflect on what I hear, thinking, "Okay, people are doing drum 'n' bass. I've got to do drum 'n' bass." A lot of what I hear are a lot of old soundtracks, disembodied from films. They're creating these big emotions and painting these aural pictures. That's definitely infected my core, the way I hear things, and the different chord shapes that come out of different composers like Jerry Goldsmith have really turned my head around. Sometimes I will hear incredible programming and I'll think, "Fuck, how did they do that?" and I'll find out how they did it. But I'm not going to go make a Kid606 record. He does that. I might hear some ideas -- not necessarily consciously -- but it all goes in.

Yeah, it all percolates down. You just did the Meltdown festival in London with Matt Johnson [from The The]. I was trying to track down some information about that show and it seems that people were pretty up in arms about what you two did. Was it the two of you doing instrumental versions of The The songs?

J.G.: No, we did songs from The The's catalogue. The theme of the show was "London" -- that was the theme which Matt chose -- the theme of Meltdown, as we understood it, was to challenge of what you do artistically and to push the boundaries a bit. I think what we did pretty much polarized his fans to the point of fisticuffs in the lobby of the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

He wanted to do something that wasn't with a band format. He had done a lot of touring with a band -- stripped down to a four piece which reproduced his songs -- and I think he got to a point where he didn't necessarily need to be in a rock band. He wanted to use Meltdown as an opportunity to try out different ideas. He had some new equipment which he wanted to utilize, which he wanted to hook up to my setup. So I got there two or three weeks in advance and we started linking stuff together.

It took a hell of a lot of troubleshooting. One thing wouldn't talk to another and things were crashing -- there was some hair pulling -- and then we got things talking to one another. And there was the orientation of the show. I had a few ideas about how I wanted things to sound and he did as well. We concurred about that and a lot of it sounded maybe a little bit like a song on the Steroid Maximus album: moody, slightly funky, back beat, kind of creepy strings coming in. He'd sing the lyrics to one of his songs to that. It was like creating eight remixes. Anyone expecting to hear that jangling pop version of The The from 1992 was probably really disappointed. [Laughs] It was a bit darker than that.

We had a big screen behind us, projecting images of London that a friend of his had shot, as well as two 16mm projectors on stage shooting on us, and a lighting designer. He was manipulating his voice live and we were creating live segues and, yeah, it was nice.

I was reading that the audience hadn't reacted all that well and I was thinking, "What? It sounds like a really good time. Where's their sense of adventure?"

J.G.: Yeah. There are people who said that they really dug it, and I'm sure there are people for whom it wasn't what they wanted to hear. Maybe they aren't used to going to The The shows and getting something like that. Personally, I like to do things like that.

Do you think that your audience has that expectation? "Ah, a new Foetus record. It is going to sound like this." Is there a resistance to change?

J.G.: I don't really know. I have a hard time getting a profile on my audience. [Laughs]

There is this huge push on right now for nostalgia tours here in the States. The music labels always want you to produce the same record you did last time if that one sold well. I mean, I saw The The on his last tour and it was good. But it sounds like Matt pushing his boundaries would have been a much more interesting show.

J.G.: Look, Dylan in Newport. 1966. Dylan goes electric. And they hated it. I don't think Matt is interested in trotting out the same thing year after year. By the end of the last Foetus European tour, I was certainly sick of doing the Foetus live band. I wanted to take the Foetus live band into more of an electronic realm. When I was touring in 1996/1997, it sometimes got up to three guitars on stage and it was really pummelling. When you reduce a lot of the songs which were originally made from composites of different sounds jarring against one another -- creating these overtones and stuff like that -- when you reduce it down to one or two notes on the guitar, it really dumbs it down a lot. It's a great, pummelling wall of sound experience, but it isn't what I wanted to do forever. I felt like I had taken that rock thing -- because Foetus live was always much more rock -- as far as I wanted to go. When I re-assembled it last year as a five piece with the samples being a lot more essential to the nerve center and everything else framed around that, I was much happier with the result.

But, over the course of the year, I had three or four line-ups of the band. People drop off, you know, it isn't like I have a band on retainer. I kept finding that I was starting from scratch all the time, teaching the band the material so that we could tour, and I could never get ahead. You'd do one tour and get your head wrapped around that set. And then the next tour would start and you'd rehearse again, adding X number of new songs or departing from where you were at. But, in this case, it was a matter of teaching the band the basic set again, and I got real fucking sick of it. And now I think, "God, do I really want to go into teaching a band new material again?"

Things like Baby Zizanie are a big break from that and the freedom that it affords. Just working in that milieu where you can throw this shit on your back and get on the train. I can get on a plane to, say, Greece, you know. I want to have that as well but, on the other end of the spectrum, I want to have the 19-piece band too. I think that it isn't without the realm of possibility that I might work with an orchestra in the next year or two.

Foetus is up on the blocks. It's having a radical rethink and I've got about five songs towards the next album which I'm really happen with. I have no idea what my audience is going to think about it. And I don't really care. These songs are for me and an audience is kind of incidental to that. But I think it is really strong material.

Do you find that passionate involvement brings its own audience?

J.G.: One would like to think so. But I think there are a lot of passionately involved people out there who have no audience. I don't know. I think there are a lot of dispassionately involved people who have huge audiences.

Yeah, makes you wonder about the quality of the audience.

J.G.: Yeah, well, I don't have someone at the door trying to gauge if people pass muster before they are allowed in. [Laughs]

On the web:
all things Foetus (official site)

Inside Earpollution:
Steroid Maximus album review