Star: Do you feel like you've done better at picking out singles, or do you think it's still always a surprise?
Rhys Fulber: I let the record company do that a lot of times, because I'm not a marketing person, you know, I try and make as many songs as I can and then let them decide. I don't know a lot of artists who pick their own singles. You try and make a bunch as songs as good as you can and then the people who have to sell the record ultimately, they're usually the ones that make that decision, you know, it's usually not one person, it's usually a whole bunch of different people.
Star: So as one of the forerunners of kind of the more modern industrial, how were you inspired to
Star: t doing electronic music?
Rhys Fulber: I've been around music my entire life, I don't know anything else. You know, I
Star: ted playing music when I was really young, playing drums, and my father was in bands and had a recording studio, so as a child I would just hang around all the time. And I remember synthesizers back in the 70s and I remember playing with them and being really interested in them and I played drums, I got really into punk rock when I was young. Around 1984, I think I'd say, about 1984/83, I kind of got more and more into synthesizers and playing with drum machines instead of playing drums and just listening to electronic music a lot more than other types of music, and it just sort of went from there. And then eventually I kind of got around to discovering all this underground industrial music. This probably came through because, you know, when I was a kid in Vancouver, pretty early on Skinny Puppy came out and blew everyone's mind. 1984 is when I got a synthesizer and kind of
Star: ted fiddling around with it, and then I met Bill about 1986 and he was in Skinny Puppy and it just sort of went from there. Everyone was just sort of mucking around and I knew so many people, everyone was making tapes and stuff. Not so much like tapes to get record deals, but everyone was just experimenting. It was a really cool time actually, it was very artistic. I just knew so many people that had, you know, a little studio to twiddle around in, and that's sort of where it all came from.
Star: So what is it like to
Star: t out being a fan of people like Skinny Puppy and then turn out to be their long-time colleagues?
Rhys Fulber: Well it was just because there was a lot of stuff like that happening in the city, a lot of people just kind of got into it, you know, and it's sort of like how the Sex Pistols were basically the first punk rock band. I was there when it sort of happened and, you know, everyone was getting creative just around the same time.
Star: Well nowadays it seems to be like a more modern trend that people are making most of their music exclusively with the computer and moving away from using like manual instruments. How do you see that fitting in to the picture of things stagnating, do you think that it's going to come full circle and they're going to
Star: t picking up instruments again?
Rhys Fulber: Well that's kind of what I'm doing, because I'm kind of bored with it to be honest, so that's why on the new Conjure One record there's a lot of guitars, there's real bass, there's live drums. I'm kind of going back that way because there's only so many ways to skin a cat, you know, and after a while you go 'OK, I've got to try something else.' And one thing I thought was cool about those old Skinny Puppy records is that a lot of the keyboard parts is someone playing it and just recording it on tape, it's not necessarily even sequences, and that's what gives it that sound and I think it's really cool. Personally I am trying to go back more to doing things that way, because the technology's become more accessible and anyone can have a studio. But that doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be a lot of better music, because the ratio is about the same as it was back then. I just find with that kind of music, no one's really picked up the ball and reinvented it. People are still influenced by the same groups and no one's really pushed the boundaries.
Star: So talking about other bands and what-not, what about other peoples' music makes you want to produce it or makes you want to engineer or work on that album with them?
Rhys Fulber: Well, a lot of times it's just whoever asks. I mean, I did a couple of records with an English band called Paradise Lost, and that's one of the cases where I really liked that band. But for the most part, it's just whoever calls up and has an interest in what I'm doing and wants to incorporate that into what I do, I mean that's usually how it works. I mean, I don't like be so arrogant to assume that all these different people want to work with me, so I just kind of sit back and just, you know, let things sort of happen how they happen.
