When i first discovered industrial, i was in love with it immediately. Skinny Puppy, Ministry, Front Line Assembly, KMFDM, i was blown away by what i saw, and devoured everything I could from the bands i loved.
I went to every show, I bought 5th generation bootlegs, and i wrote my own music. I wanted to perform live so badly, i had this vision in my head of what it would be, what it would sound like, and it was so unreachable.
Keyboard players? I couldn’t really find any. No one played keys, and anyone that did was a piano or organ player and was offended and frightened by what i wanted to do.
I had been playing in punk, hardcore, metal, ‘alternative’, and rap groups for years and years, and my friends loved me as much as i loved them, and eventually when i was getting divorced, they stepped up.
Viktim would keep me from falling apart, i suppose was what they thought, and they were right.
So my lifelong friends banded together with me, and we started hashing out what this beast was going to be up in RPM rehersal studios in philly.
Samples, and keys on our backing track, and scotty played along real drums to it. Check our videos, you’ll see a pretty determined look on his face, and a big pair of sony headphones. Scotty was REALLY playing all the drums you heard, he was playing to a click in those headphones, and its alot harder than you think it would be.
We performed for quite a while, it started out pretty strong at first, but then we started losing ground. Was it my personality, was it our music, was it changing tastes and trends?
I think a big part of it was that we rolled into a show with guitar stacks, big ass drums, slinging guitars around like giant cocks, and it just wasn’t what was “industrial” anymore.
So viktim fell apart. I joined 62 degress latitude for a couple live shows, i played keys. yeah, i PLAYED them. I bounced around, and decided to ‘pay it forward’ and helped my friend jaws bring his dream alive.
Over the past two years MyParasites has come pretty far, and are doing well. We’ve been booked on decent shows, ive gotten to open for bands i love (Chemlab being a big thrill) and ive driven all over the east coast and midwest.
Recently i started playing live drums for ninetwelve, and it was ALOT of fun. Its hard, lol, but its fun. Mike (912) is also in myparasites. Its very incestious, myparasites, viktim, ninetwelve, and actually 62 degress latitude have all shared or share members, we’ve all grown close, and thats a good thing. Thats probably the most important thing.
Anyway, i seem to be losing direction, this is starting to sound like the beginning of a suicide note, and its not.
Its that i was watching some viktim videos online, and reading comments where people were saying we weren’t ‘industrial’ or we werent ‘cyber punk’ or we werent EBM, and it started to bother me.
We put so much effort into this, and now, yeha man, everybody and their little brother is in an industrial band. They all have midi controllers (controlling what? i dont see any rack gear or laptops) and scary make up, and skinny kids screaming about how evil they are, but where the fuck were they?
where were they when we were playing punk shows, rock bars, metal shows, because there wasn;t forty billion ‘industrial’ nights. Fuck, ive been around a while, some of these guys, ive none in the scene for a while, and six months ago they didn’t play keyboards. Youre telling me in six months some kid BORROWED a keyboard off a friend, and he became a virtuoso?
fuck that, youre full of shit and you’re faking it.
I get told sometimes “you sounded a lil sloppy tonite”. Fuckin aye THANK YOU. do you know what i sounded sloppy and the other bands were computer tight? because i was fuckin playing it, and they were pretending.
a friend a couple years back called it ‘ghost keys’ and thats stuck in my head ever since then.
I dunno. look, its a show. i know the show is the most important part., but dont fuckin trash my shit, or im going to start pointing out your flaws, and ya know what, when you see a band go onstage, and they fuckin slay with no technical difficulties with the massive amount of shit on that stage, it makes me doubt what i see.
this whole thing is negative. but this is my personal page, so i can be negative if i want in my blog, my journal, but ill get a lil positive here at the end.
there are some bands doing it the way i did, and the way i think it ’should’ be done. 62 Degrees latitude, Voodoo Velcro, Punish Yourself, T.O.T.S, they are all doing it ‘right’
i think The Wired from york is doing it right so far too. i like what i see, maybe i should ask to play drums for them, that might be pretty dope.
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