Years before the current wave of indie-electro acts dominated the airwaves there was The Faint. The artists formerly known as Norman Bailer (and once featuring Bright Eyes's Conor Oberst in their line-up) ditched their guitars for synthesisers for their 1999 release Blank-Wave Arcade and have since pioneered the electro-punk sound, receiving critical acclaim for such albums as 2001's Danse Macabre and their latest release Fasciinatiion. yourGigs spoke to singer Todd Fink on the eve of their Australian visit.
yourGigs (yG): What initially attracted you to the synthesisers?
Todd Fink (TF): It was the idea that you could synthesise something electronically, manipulate soundwaves into anything that you could imagine - it seemed vast what you could with a synthesiser, especially at the time when we didn't understand anything about them. What we played with them wasn't all that technical at first; we just did what came naturally to us, we just did little melodies on them. That's where we started, and eventually we moved towards making more electronic music. Now we're trying to make that balance all the time.
yG: How has having a death-metal guitarist in your band contributed to your sound?
TF: It's definitely interesting to communicate with someone who is ... truly atonal-minded. His idea of a melody is so different from all of ours, and which notes sound good together and time signatures and all that stuff. It's like having an alien in a band. Every time we make a record now we think, "We should have listened to Dapose more". It would be more interesting if we could make his ideas work more. We're still working towards that and I think we'll see more of him in the future.
yG: Why did you choose to record and release Fasciinatiion independently?
TF: I think we always wanted to. We've done a lot of the recording ourselves in the past [so] we knew how to do it and Joel, who plays bass and guitar in the band, had put together a home studio and he had recorded bands, and as a band we ended up building our own recording studio and using his equipment.
yG: Did you face any challenges approaching the album in this way?
TF: There were no disadvantages to recording it ourselves. We got to make it more how we want it to sound and I think it's really a privilege for a band. It would be great if every band could decide if they could get what they want out of the music. Of course, hiring a producer ... a lot of times you could get something to sound a lot better than the band can imagine. But we're such control freaks. We'd just rather screw it up ourselves.
yG: Fasciinatiion sees you moving thematically from songs about sex and parties to a more futuristic focus. What inspired that shift?
TF: To me there was no conscious decision to make something different, it's just I changed as a person. Since the last record I've really been more engaged in scientific thought and religious and philosophical thought. Now I find myself so impressed with everything all the time, you know [laughs]. Maybe it's not cool; maybe its cooler to be jaded, but I find myself moving away from that more every day and everything I look at I can just think about it in amazement. To me maybe this record captures some of that.
yG: So what can we expect from your upcoming live shows in Australia?
TF: We've just been on tour and it's going amazing. I can confidently say that you can expect to have fun at a Faint show, you can expect to dance. We try to set a mood for a party with music and a good sweaty time
... In figuring out what we're going to play for these tours, we couldn't agree to cross out many of the songs we usually play - we just added more songs so we're playing longer than we usually do because of having a new record.
yG: I've heard your gigs being described as 'part gallery, part rave'.
TF: That sounds pretty good! [Laughs]. We do spend a lot of time and energy working on lighting and video, and the production end of things as far as how it looks. You've got to, at some point, admit you're entertainers!
Michelle Ho
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