Few artists can honestly say that they witnessed and contributed to the birth of modern industrial music... Rhys Fulber can. Widely known for his work with Austrian musician Bill Leeb on a little project called Frontline Assembly, Fulber has cemented the use of synthesizers and electronic drums in industrial music. Since Frontline Assembly, Fulber has expanded his musical horizons by composing for numerous side projects such as Intermix, Delirium, Synaesthesia and now Conjure One. Living outside of his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, Rhys avoids the big cities and mostly keeps to his quiet rural home. There he works on remixes and production for acts such as Mindless Self Indulgence, Megadeth, and the Tea Party. Despite his busy schedule, Rhys Fulber takes some time out to talk with us at About.Dance.com about the release of the new Conjure One album; Extraordinary Ways.
Star: So Delerium and Conjure One are both very ethereal feeling, how do you see them interacting with the more club-oriented genres like industrial and EBM?
Rhys Fulber: I don't know, I never think about it to be honest. I thought it was something kind of different, I don't really connect the two things that much really. The Conjure One stuff is pretty different than what influenced what you would call industrial. So I don't know, it's hard for me to say because it seems to me that it's a different audience, but I could be wrong.
Star: Well, given the similarities between Delerium and Conjure One, I guess could you contrast the two for me, or I guess what was the intention behind having them as two separate projects?
Rhys Fulber: Well, I don't think they sound that similar. The way the music's put together, to me, is quite different, the way the songs are written for Delerium and the way the songs are written for Conjure One, the working process differs a fair amount.
Star: How so?
Rhys Fulber: Well, with Delerium, I'm working with Bill and he will bring an idea of something and then we'll assemble a song, a lot of the times we're assembling songs around samples and stuff like that, whereas with Conjure One it's more like stuff that's just sort of written or it's just a piano and stuff like that. I mean there's a lot more live instruments on Conjure One than on Delerium. I think as I'm doing all the programming on both projects, that's probably where you're going to have a similarity because it's the same person doing a lot of the texturing and stuff like that. But the feeling of the music feels different to me. That's the only way I can describe it, Conjure One feels a little more intimate from my perspective.
Star: It's interesting that you say it's personal because it seems like with Conjure One you're working with so many vocalists. How does that songwriting process come in when you're working with so many different vocalists, and what inspires you to work with so many different vocalists?
Rhys Fulber: Well, what inspired me to work with different vocalists is that I'm not much of a vocalist myself, so to get things on a level that I'd be happy with, I have to bring in someone who is a singer. It's like I don't really want to work with a bunch of different vocalists, but because I don't have a permanent vocalist yet, I'm kind of left with that. The music is quite personal to me, the musical writing process and everything. And then basically what I'm doing is I'm presenting someone with a pretty near complete picture of the music, and then just having them write some vocal melodies and lyrics. And the ones that I really related to are the ones that ended up on the record. And it's just the themes of the songs seem more personal to me.
Star: So you decide who's appropriate for which song based on that, or how does the match up process work?
Rhys Fulber: Well on the new record, the match up process was really not that complicated. The songs with Jane were just like 'here, here's these songs,' she writes the lyrics and sends them back, and that was basically it, it was really pretty simple. Songs like Face the Music, I did with this guy named Peter Wright, who's a writer, and he just had Tiff Lacey sing it because he needed someone to sing it to hear what it would sound like, and it sort of stayed. I mean it wasn't like we went through as much as I did on the first record or like we do with Delirium with auditioning stuff, this stuff all kind of just happened, you know, it was pretty free-flowing. This song Forever Lost, I actually wrote that with a friend of mine, and we just had her sing it, you know, so we had already worked on the lyrics and stuff ahead of time and we just needed a voice for it. So I think that's sort of how this record differs.
