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I was blown away by Desert Opuses, the second solo work of the one man instrument fiesta that is High Watt Electrocutions. The album rocks like one or two in and out of the stoner rock community. At times, soleman Ryan Settee tips its hat to Kyuss' blown out tuning, at others you can imagine him fucking Nico, reminding Lour Reed what it used to be like and slapping Andy Warhol upside the head for being such a pretentious white haired dead man, all at the same time. I was in awe. So I had to ask him a few questions and he had a lot to say.  Read on and spread the word...  

 

First of all, excellent album. There are lots of things going on Desert Opuses and you work on your own. Why is High Watt Electrocutions a one man band?

Thanks a lot! The reason that I started doing everything is probably moreso due to the punk rock / independent credo of doing whatever you can to save money (laughs). I love a lot of 80's punk and a lot of independent and fringe music where there really wasn't any demand to do things past what you wanted to see done, because you believed in them, and there wasn't / isn't necessarily the people or budgets or the industry support in a traditional way.

But there is some truth to that in that you cut some overhead that way, while doing it the way that you want to see it done. Ultimately, I wanted to do this to create something that I didn't hear or didn't see done enough, in merging disparate influences of various types of psych and drone and mood music.

Ultimately, I'd done this all--or as much as I could--to get it as close as I could to the songs in my head, where I'd be hearing layers of vocals and guitars and stuff like that. The studio becomes a great tool to write and expand on songs, and that becomes tough sometimes to do when you're paying a producer an hourly rate and also having band members give you the evil eye when you're doing a whole bunch of things that maybe they don't like....like putting a melodica on something or whatnot (laughs). Then you're sort of under the gun to compromise, and let's face it, the most successful bands have usually been compromises, whether that was between John and Paul trying to fit in George's stuff and Ringo's stinkers (laughs). Or Mick and Keith getting into fist fights, or even Jason Pierce and Sonic Boom merely tolerating each other towards the end of Spacemen 3's career.

Did you ever try working with a band?

For sure, there's both, and I've been in other bands. The advantages are that you have additional creativity, additional people to take heat off of you and contribute things. That's when things are going good, that's the ideal, and I love that ideal. But the key word is ‘ideal’, I still live in a bit of a naive world where all my favorite bands got along and were best of friends and everything, but as we know, egos and the traditional ‘conflict of interests’ gets cited, but really, you have to wonder if it's just someone eating the last piece of pie or whether it's because they're a true jerk, you know, like Danzig (laughs). He's blown so many opportunities with great bands and great musicians, because no one can be bigger or better than him.

That's the reason why supergroups tend to be better on paper than in reality, because someone's gotta lead and then the others have to be accepting of that lead and not be contemptuous of it and add enough contributions so as to not distract from what's already there. And that's when you either get great variety, or terrible infighting. Look at Rocket From The Tombs, David and Cheetah resented each other's direction in that band and it tore them apart....one wanted the more rock side, the other wanted the more arty side.

The other problem becomes that when someone's not pulling their weight, it sometimes becomes difficult to get excited about it. As a band, when you start getting serious and this guy's got to do that, the other guy's got to do that, it doesn't always work, because in anything, people move at different paces and have different work ethics. In other bands that I was in, the priorities were mismatched--I always found myself putting more priority on it, wanting to practice more, work on recordings more, tour more, etc. With just myself, I can scrap ideas without having to tell anyone that it's not good enough, and I don't have to worry about fitting musicians on any given song. That's why some songs are instrumental and have no vocals, some have bass, some have no bass....others have no drums, or just rely on sparse percussion. "The Ruins of the Pyramids", the bass parts are played via organ, because it has a drone-y sustain to it. If I had to tell that to a bass player, he might think that it's code for ‘hey that bass line really stinks so I'm going to play this on organ’, you know? (laughs). I throw out way more ideas of my own than I keep, so it's easier to be harder on myself than to seemingly have people contribute things that they may perceive as never being good enough. And it gets done faster, more effective, and it's more cost effective as well.

In your website you state that High Watt Electrocutions is essentially a project derived out of the desire to break the constraints of usual ‘verse chorus verse structure in most modern music.' What motivated/triggered this desire?

A lot of previous bands that I've been in--all of which had something that I liked about them and never achieved anything past Winnipeg's city limits-- were pretty constricting after awhile. They were always open to my ideas, but in the studio, it got to be the point where I really wanted to make mind-bending epic, crafted albums, and they always seemed to settle for ‘good enough’. I hate good enough (laughs). ‘This is good enough’. Alright, so what's the inspiration to be great, excellent, challenging? Even if you fail at that, I think the most that any artist or musician owes themselves is to at least attempt greatness. The point is that you aimed for it, that it's the intention.

The reason for the lack of a lot of traditional structures with HWE, is because I had found as a producer, that when you have a couple of choruses per song, you're always trying to figure out how to build them up.....and usually not enough time to make the point before the 3 or 4 minutes is up. When you repeat things, it opens up a lot of room for improvisation and experimenting and groove and swing. If you listen to old blues songs, they're super repetitive and they're often detuned to drop d or drop c, some of them were the original template for stoner rock / drone rock. But they've got style, attitude, personality. Same thing with a lot of traditional hymns.....something repeated over and over and over again. People really like repetition, I think if you have a good enough riff, that it's what people are after. Even in hip hop, they repeat things like crazy. It's only in rock music that repetition is perceived as something that you've got to hold off on, mete out, dole out in small doses in choruses or that outro or whatever. When you've got a whole song as a chorus, it allows you to really go nuts on the layers and expansion and tension. Not enough songs have enough tension in them or build up. It's sort of got slammed for being cliche in the post-rock Mogwai / Explosions In The Sky genre, but at least there's tension there. If that's cliche, it's no more cliche than the verse/ chorus/ verse/ solo template.

 Previous to High Watt Electrocutions, what did you do as a musician?

I'd always done home recordings ever since I'd got my first guitar in 1995. Most of those were ghetto blaster recordings, you know, the old Dinosaur Jr "Poledo" liner note description ‘recorded by Lou on two crappy tape decks in his bedroom’? (laughs) Well, previous to the digital recording technology, to me, that was the reality, and around 1995, the digital home recording setup that most take for granted nowadays wasn't there......it was 4 track / 8 track cassette, or hand held recorders or boombox recordings. The cool thing about boomboxes was that they had a natural built in compression, which you don't get with digital recorders.

Then I'd recorded on 4 track cassette, then 8 track digital, now 16 track digital for the longest time. I never take my equipment for granted, because I know what it can do and I know how absolutely different that it is to make a record in 2009 compared to 1995. I'm lucky to be able to have a studio in my living space, it's like a permanent huge blank canvas in which to create aural paintings and textures and things that go beyond what people expect. Night Songs (the previous album) ended up being culled from many sessions where I'd got comfortable enough as a player and producer to release the recordings as something that I'd look back and be proud of, even though I'm always criticizing anything I'm doing or done.

Were you in any bands? If so, what kind of music did you play?

The other bands I was in were mostly regular rock bands. They were fun and the guys were mostly all cool and everything, but it suffered from a lack of maybe the band members taking it seriously to tour and do what serious bands do. I think that the thing that we all realized was that in order for it to be serious, that there would have to be some risks--both in our everyday lives, and monetarily. No one was willing to do either, so that was something that I decided to do with High Watt---put a lot of effort into recordings, put a lot of money into them, and promo like mad. And do as many interviews as possible and get out there and be happy to talk about it. A lot of artists get sick of answering the same questions, but I don't. It's always new to someone else.

People can't hear something if they've never heard of it, but to expect people to hear about it if you don't do any work is unrealistic. In order to succeed, you have to be willing to fail many, many times. Most people just expect to succeed, but if you look at the stories of most of the fringe or more different acts, it's been a long road to even being just a cult artist. If you're not in it for anything but the music, you'll quit pretty soon, because it's for the wrong reasons.

Taking into consideration that you work alone and your music seems to have several layers, how do you write music?

Well, that's a great question. Some songs are based around a drum repetition or sequence, others start with the guitar or bass and so on. Some start from the rhythm section on up, which I think is an interesting way to write, because I don't like having to write just around guitars. Some also are created from synths / keys on up, which gives it a different perspective. Sometimes I really want to get a certain effect on there, like phaser or flanger or something like that, and messing around with that creates other textures or possibilities. Some are created around a vocal hook.

I've found that the urban environment of being around cars and noises and people jack-hammering and things like that have kind of colored the sound, and that's why there's a big din of things happening in the sound where it's almost too active, too cluttered sounding, where you have all these things fighting for dominance. Most of my favorite bands absorbed their influences and became perfectly representative of the everyday living of those areas. Here, we're out in the middle of nowhere in Winnipeg, so it really is this vast landscape of open prairie fields, large open spaces, and punishing, punishingly cold winters. The city is big and noisy, but then there's all this open rural country space, which I think is found in the loud to soft, cluttered to sparse dichotomy of HWE's stuff.

With so much music going on how do you know when you've finished writing a song? Does it ever get to a point where you actually have to strip the song of some music just to make it easier to appreciate?

It gets to be a bit difficult to figure out exactly when it's finished, simply because the best and worst part of a home studio is that the cliche is that it's never finished! And really, that's kind of true. I change a lot of things--track lengths, mixes, song sequencing, etc often until the final pressing time and that's part of the reason why Desert Opuses has some differences in the songs between them, like, "Headphone Opus" is longer on the album by a couple of minutes, and it seemed to fit the vinyl's vibe, whereas I was going for a bit more brevity on the cd and seeing as that the running length of the cd is longer by 5 minutes, I figured that it would work better as a faded in song and shorter on the cd.

It's great to have the time to work things out, but artists can also suffer from not releasing anything. "Oh, this will be this much better when this and that is done....". "Headphone Opus" is another instance, originally it had drums and bass and guitar throughout the whole running length, but i'd gone into a studio to do a piano track over it and the first few minutes ended up being quieter. "Stripped Ruins" had an alternate harmonica take in a minor key that my friend did that was as good as the one on "The Ruins Of The Pyramids", so that got stripped down (hence the title), with a more haunting harmonica part. Technically it's a bit of a remix or a reprise, but I like variations on central themes anyways.

A lot of things get changed in the sequencing of the album too.....some things are better in isolation by themselves; other things that seemed like they wouldn't work, work tremendously sometimes when they weren't originally perceived. That's why it's good to try a bunch of different textures--soft, loud, fast, slow, cheery, melancholic, etc. Different keys, different vibes, etc. A lot of what I'm originally going for doesn't make the mix or the end track sequencing. That's why a lot of songs are faded in or out, because they start sooner or go on longer amidst a jam that really clicked at a certain point that nailed what I wanted to hear as a listener.

I think that the most effective bands can separate playing from listening......sometimes when I play things, they seem great, but when listening to them, they're out of tune, off time, or just aren't as interesting. You have to know what you want to hear as a fan, as a listener, of your own act, and you have to be brutally objective as to what's working and what's not. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'd say everything that I do turns out absolutely the way I want it to, but I work on it until it's as good as it's going to get. But there are definitely points where you can work yourself out of ideas, where the initial idea was great, and then it mutates into something that you don't really connect with, for whatever reason. Sometimes it's good to walk away from an idea for a couple of days, a week, a month, a half a year. With High Watt, there's no pressure or deadlines to get anything done, which is nice. The end product ends up being a bit of a greatest hits from a bunch of sessions. (laughs)

In your site I see a lot of instruments, amps, pedals, percussion and other stuff. After seeing this all I could think of was that one, you must be rich, and two, you must have a lot of free time in your hands. Obviously you master several instruments, which one was your first instrument? Which instrument do you master?

Guitar is my primary instrument, but I like to put emphasis on every part and every instrument. The free time thing yeah. I work on this a lot, kind of like a mad scientist in his lab. I wish I could say that I was rich (laughs), but like most musicians, they'll probably tell you that they owe money or that they're assets rich, but money poor. In my case, I've spent a decade and a half acquiring that stuff from the buy and sell papers, used instrument stores, pawn shops, etc, and that's all to make better albums, so with the pictures and descriptions, that's to sort of let people know what's going into the albums, that it's not just some tossed off demo with a shitty solid state amp and whatnot. I can tell you, that the gear has come at a hefty price—a lot of weekends spent saving money, sacrifices--I don't spend much on clothes or vacations or stuff like that. But it's nice to have those tools to work with, in case I want a certain sound or texture or something like that.

With things like the vinyl for Desert Opuses, that's yet more sacrifices, because for most, that would be a huge vacation or down payment for a house something like that. It's lost a lot of money, but those are all risks that have to be done to be taken serious and all of that. Shipping out promos really adds up, too, with postage. And sometimes, I do wonder why I'm doing it at times, because it's not for the money.....psych/ stoner rock is never something that one makes much off of. But I love doing it and have complete creative control, own my own masters and music, and can offer more to audiences and fans that way. And I see it as a way to contribute to the social/ artistic fabric of the world, in that the music inevitably alters the way that the world's course goes.....even if it's in a small way and if it's just someone listening to the album for 40 minutes, you know, even to do that to a few people has some sort of alternate future/ effect on the world. Hopefully for the better, for constructivity. You look at nations and civilizations that don't have music, and some of them are ingrained in hundreds of years of war. Maybe if they had the power of music, they'd be more constructive or happy, who knows? Music can bring people together, like a religion or a sports team.

I'm 30 years old and don't have kids or a mortgage--just an apartment where I have really good neighbours (laughs) and a perhaps naive notion that maybe music can connect with people on some level that isn't just lowest common denominator stuff. And I love lowest common denominator stuff as the Ramones, Motorhead and AC/DC are big favorites of mine, but someone's gotta present something different than that, and different from other things in general.

 What most people spent/ spent on schooling or having a family or settling down, i'm still trying to prove that there's something yet to be done. It could be naive, but the music has connected with a small but appreciative audience such as yourself, Hansel. If people like you weren't, maybe i'd embrace the whole typical lifestyle of having kids and leading the regular life and maybe my friends and relatives wouldn't give me that, you know, "when are you gonna give up this hobby and start contributing to this world?" (laughs)

Which instrument do you consider the hardest to master?

The bass is definitely the hardest to master, simply because you've got to take what the drummer is doing, and then consider what the rest of the band is doing and arrive at a middle ground where it makes sense. If you follow the root notes of the guitars or the rest of the song too much, then you may as well just have a bassier rhythm part like with detuned fuzz guitars, which could often fill that void. I realized that my timing was off a bit on "Night Songs", so I wanted to tighten that up a bit for Desert Opuses and make the bass lines a little more melodic and developed. A lot of people have mentioned the bass lines, so I guess it worked. That's great, because that was a focus of mine.

Which one the easiest?

The easiest? Hmm. I'm not sure if there's really an easy instrument, if you really want to get great at it, there's always a lot of little things and nuances that make things hard to master. It's easy to take things for granted, like getting to a certain level where you're comfortable with how you play something, but there's always things to be learned.

I haven't listened to Night Songs, but sonically, how does it differ from Desert Opuses? Was there anything you learned from Night Songs that you wanted to correct in Desert Opuses?

One thing that I can say that I probably wouldn't do now, is make another 70 minute record (laughs). The reasoning for that is 1) because people's time is valuable, and 2) there's so many great bands out there. I think that people want more concentrated doses of more intense things. I love Night Songs in how it takes that risk in running time, but now, I wouldn't do it. 40-45 minutes seems to be the magic number, and if there was one thing that influenced Desert Opuses, is that you can only fit so much material onto the vinyl medium, while still having it be in optimum sound and not having static and skips and all that. On cd, you can fit 74-80 minutes of material on most cds and it costs you the same amount for duplication and pressing. With vinyl, you get into double album territory when you hit that range, and vinyl costs so much more to do and the profit margins aren't big. Now, with the extra songs, I release them as bonus tracks at certain times.

If you've ever wondered why the hell there was skips and static on a brand new pressing that you've got, it's because they either exceeded the vinyl's recommended running time per side (18-20 minutes per side), or had inferior pressing methods. Credit John Golden for that information and his superior job, because he told me that he doesn't like to master albums over 20 minutes a side, and there's a reason why he did the SubPop catalogue and a good portion of SST's roster. So I had to chisel the time back on the album a bit, and added a bit of running time to the cd as a slight bit of compromise. So the vinyl definitely influenced what went on "Desert Opuses", just because it didn't have a lot of time to meander, and that's why I think people like you have caught onto the experimental nature of it within a 2-4 minute context.

HWE is based on a Middle Eastern theme, what is this theme and why this approach?

Well, it's not quite Maiden's Powerslave, but what is? (laughs) A lot of the album kind of had some Middle Eastern leads--guitar solos that weren't solos, but were lead guitars in place of vocals--that drove it and I was reading about some Egyptian stuff, like on King Tut and that. There was speculation that Tut was murdered, that the throne was up for grabs to commoners, so you had all this chaos and controversy back then. His tombs were one of the few that weren't looted by robbers or artifact seekers......the myth is that Tut's curse got 'em, and I thought that the track "Tut Will Have His Revenge" was sort of an interesting take that even in death, you can have the last laugh, that he's remembered all these years and all the looters and backstabbers vying for the throne are all forgotten. The chaos of the noise freakout amidst drum breakdowns and that was meant to be metaphorical for the chaos that must have happened then.

He'd been erased from their history in all the books and literature and even the hieroglyphs were doctored and changed; only one wall in the Temple of Luxor acknowledged him even existing after religious upheaval had happened when his father, Akhenaten, had changed all gods to one god in Aten and moved Thebes. But his grave still remains, and it's baffled all of the historians as to why the grave would remain, but his history would be wiped out

Also, the harmonic scale was used alot on this album, and i'd never used it a whole lot in the past......on "Night Songs", it was done on "Sonic Maelstrom" and at points, but I never set out specifically to use it, as I'd used the blues scales a lot, which cover a lot of ground from a fuzzy, heavy death blues sort of standpoint. The harmonic scale I call "the snake charming scale" to those that aren't familiar with some of the more technical aspects......because it really does sound like one should be charming snakes with it (laughs). It's that dark, flat/ sharp "black key on a piano" emphasis. Most steer clear of those keys and it's not a revelation for heavy metallers, but i'm not sure if enough bands point out the importance of the harmonic scale in creating a really dark, unsettling sound. Iommi did it tons, and what he did was essentially take classical music in with the blues and created heavy metal by using more semi tones than just whole tones. Others did it before him with rock music, but none did it with as much emphasis, I think, before he made it a specific part of his sound. But the point, I think, is to make it harrowing, paranoid. I really wanted the leads to sound paranoid, creepy, claustrophobic, where it would put off most of the average audience to be like, "what the fuck is this?" (laughs). Confusion and terror are perfectly valid emotions--as much as happiness or contentment. I think that dark music like the Swans or Godflesh or Spacemen 3 all put people off, because they're having to confront emotions that they don't normally feel. Good art should also provoke, I think.

Desert Opuses was recorded in three different studios, what did you use each studio for?

Mostly it was done here in my own studio, but I had did some piano parts in a big studio here, they had a big Heintzmann grand piano there, so I wanted to work on that. I'm not much of a piano player--fairly utilitarian-- but I can approximate what I want to hear.. The ballistics/ attack of a real piano are interesting because when you play keyboards, they have a fast attack, in that the reaction time from your hands to the note being played is faster. With piano, the keys are heavier and you can't approach it like playing a regular keyboard or synth.

Another place was at a friend's place that we'd tracked harmonica at, and the other was at another friend's house, Don, that we'd tracked some Moog parts from his stash of vintage Moogs. The pictures don't show up so much on the back of the cd cover, but you can see them better on the back of the vinyl jacket.....the pictures are kind of there, but not, they're obscured, so you have to look harder for things there.

Did you produce the album yourself? Did you take any tips/advice from anyone while recording?

I produced it myself, yeah. I love sound and the whole process of setting up mics and hitting record and doing EQ and mixing and mastering the material, because you learn a lot about how the ear hears things versus how electronics hears something or processes it, and the challenge is to convert the soundwaves into something that's a good facsimile of what you're trying to accomplish with the writing and the performances. And that's easier said than done in a lot of cases, it takes a lot of work and a lot of trial and error and getting better equipment and training your ear to hear what you want to do more.

I have a really general way of having a really specific sound, if that makes any sense. There's certain guidelines, but in some ways, not. It depends how things flow or whether it needs more of this or more of that at any given time--maybe the mix needs more bass, maybe the song is missing vocals when it seemed like a good instrumental track, etc. I'm always open to tips, as that's how one gets better. I always try to improve or learn more about playing or recording or just being more happy or comfortable with my own range of limitations, because I do have them, and i've found constructive ways to get around that. Namely, i'm not really that great a vocalist, but I can do three part harmony stuff, which has this weird but effective vibe to it, and what people react to is overall execution, not whether someone hit the notes completely right or all of that. I could shout or growl the vocals, but it's not my personal style.

Are you 100% happy with the album? Is there anything you'd change?

I'm not really sure if any artist is 100 percent happy, but that being said, I don't know how I personally could have done anything to get closer to what I was after, it was the way I wanted it to sound and people are getting 100 percent creative vision with High Watt to get my idea of what's the best way to transpose what's in my head to the final listening medium. If I got a producer to do it, it wouldn't have turned out the same, because they would have no idea really to transfer what parts are in my head to the medium, and everyone has different versions of what they call "warm" or "transcendent", or even "great". One thing that I've realized is that people's definitions of something that should be pretty narrow, is usually pretty wide. I mean, if someone would go into a studio and tell the producer, "hey man, make me sound great", there's so many specific factors that differ with everyone's taste in that there's no way to really get that if you don't know what you already want.

I am guessing most people would categorize HWE's Desert Opuses, a stoner rock album. And I am guessing that that won't piss you off, but that you would categorize it as something else. What would you categorize it as?

The stoner tag is cool, I've done a lot of categorizing it as that, myself, because music sometimes.....no scratch that...it often becomes difficult to sum up to an average audience, and however people want to do that is fine by me, since audiences need to know what they're dealing with. I like a ton of stoner rock bands, but I never really totally exactly wanted to emulate what they were doing, because that's been done before. HWE isn't not a stoner rock band, but its appeal also extends to some people that I know aren't really into stoner rock a whole helluva lot.

I prefer to call it psychedelic, because I think that the term has been narrowed down to so many subcategories that it's got forgotten about (ie: post rock--Mogwai....they're a psychedelic band!), or maybe the term seems to refer only to a bunch of grizzled hippies, but in my case, i'm a more regular clean cut type of dude that used to smoke drugs that doesn't anymore, and I think that people think that I'm some sort of grizzled bearded wizard, but you never know. Psych music is very liberating, because the best part of it is that there's often no rules with it. Stoner rock is just psych music.....you know, you can be heavy, you can do long songs, experiment some, dispense with traditional song structures, etc. The freedom to do that, to me, is why I gravitated towards this. 5-10 years ago, I was more into garage rock and metallic rock n' roll, but in a weird way, it mutated into this because I never really wanted to be that direct, and wanted the music to be more mysterious and veiled.

But I often approach this as the "sober approach to non-sober making music", because I realize that  a lot of music comes from delving deep into one's mind and their perceptions of music, and I can come up with something that makes me feel like i'm being taken to some place that maybe I'm not normally taken to. Electronically, chemically, naturally, however you do it is great. Music is an incredible high for me.....sitting back, listening to it. I still listen to my favorite records on the headphones and/ or lying on the floor in the dark. I mean, it beats having music be a soundtrack to vacuuming or doing dishes or something like that, where people are hearing the music instead of listening to it.

I like challenging music. Because if it make people uneasy or they don't like it, that's cool. I know that it's not because it's a knockoff of something commercial or bland or whatever. I've seen tons of bands bomb playing the most commercial music--and I love a lot of mainstream and guilty pleasure type stuff--but considering the competition, there's no way to stand out. So you might as well do something different and something that reflects your individuality, even if it's something that most people won't connect with. Even within the stoner/ psych scene, I wanted to do something that was different--a more metallic version of Spacemen 3 and Hawkwind with the same weird trappings and buried vocals that they had, but sludgier. SP3 also never (or rarely) had lead guitars. There's huge lead guitars all over HWE records, and I love the tradition of big guitar solos. At some point, people became afraid to play them for whatever reason (or couldn't do it technically), but why not? A great solo has feel and character. If that's excessive, then a lot of people don't consider the cliches of singing about chicks and whatever for 5 minutes a song as being unnecessary. Instrumentals get a lot of flack because I guess people need imagery told to them and are used to someone slamming them over the head as to what to think, but I like the mystery and the element of thought process and imagination.

One of my favorite songs is "Headphone Opus", i love everything about it. The drums are stellar, I love how you arrange this instrument with such simplicity into your music Can you talk a little about how this tune came to be?

Thanks! That one took a bit more work to conceive and was a late bloomer, so to speak, as it wasn't going to be on there as it had lost a bit of focus or maybe didn't have much focus. Originally, as I'd mentioned earlier in the interview, it was all heavy straight through for 8-9 minutes, then I thought it dragged a bit too much and had no up or down or light or dark to it. The focal point is when the louder part kicked in--the lead guitar, the tremolo and phase guitars, all kind of built up, then I thought that some piano would be cool. It had a good apex, a good blast off into something exciting, I thought, but the build up along the rest of the song wasn't as good as I wanted it to be.

The first part is maybe the most stripped down part on the record for half the song with just vocals, Farfisa organ and piano. The Farfisa is this beat up old Farfisa Bravo organ that i'd got out of the used ads here for 40 bucks--you know, a real underdog-- it has this crackly, warm feel to it like the transistors are gonna blow up, this wild anomaly to some of the more predictable and controlled digital equipment that I work with. That's one of those songs like on "Obliteration", it has this almost Mellotron sound to it....that's the Bravo, this otherwise left for dead and unwanted piece of gear that rose to the occasion in a great way, like an actor that people wrote off but puts in the performance of a career. Was it on another album? I don't know. But it is here (laughs).

In the mix, i'd hard panned the vocals to one speaker, and put the delay in the other speaker, so it's this weird bouncing effect that I had to work a lot on the timing of the delay on to have it have that effect, where it was really pushing and pulling against itself. It really shows up on a headphone listen, hence the title, and the original working title for the album was intended to be "Headphone Opuses From Egypt", so it is still a bit like the title track.

It's interesting that you mention the drums.....the drums are either a love/ hate affair--they're either too monotonous and too much of a robotic bludgeoning into oblivion, or people love them. Some of the record is real drums; some of it is drum machines. Big Black, Jesus Lizard and Godflesh taught me that the music could have a more harrowing vibe with drum machines if they weren't over programmed and if they were embraced from the perspective of hypnotic and rhythmic worth. It's a highly modified Alesis SR-16, which apparently was the same drum machine that Godflesh used, though I didn't know that at the time. It has four separate outs, so I can process the sounds differently. To get a more rigid and claustrophobic sound that also is a little less tame (drum machines can sound crazy sterile at times), I run the sounds through mic preamps that are in the red, they're overdriven, angrier, clipped. Digital recording--what I record on--is naturally a bit colder, so I think that it suits the overall vibe well. But you get old tube amps and old synths and stuff like that on there to balance it out a bit.

"Tut Will Have His Revenge", it's got a bit of an early Monster Magnet flavor to it.  Am I off?

I love Monster Magnet, and at the time that I'd heard them in the early 90's, i'd dug their blatant love of 70's sounds and culture because there wasn't much else like it. In actuality, the song is meant to be a bit like something off the Stooges' "Funhouse", but Monster Magnet took alot of cues from them too, so it's all cyclical. Whatever people hear in the music is fine by me, because you can take the most obvious influences and then everyone hears something different. "Tut..." was another late song that wasn't intended to be on the album and got a new lease on life and just seemed to fit with a bit of re-working.

The Velvet Underground are definitely an important influence on this record. What does the sound of this band means to you?

I have to admit the truth......when I was younger, I had no idea what they were trying to achieve! (laughs) I think that a lot of bands may tell you that they always instantly loved a lot of bands or acts, but they're too afraid to admit it for being perceived as being uncool. But saying that, there's tons of acts that I didn't quite "get" when I was younger, only to love them later. I think that there are bands that are beyond you or I or anyone else at any given time. I think that even John Peel mentioned something about that, that if he doesn't understand a band, that he said something like it was his problem, not the band's, that he'd eventually find a way to understand it or something like that.

That being said, I really really connected with them when I heard "Venus In Furs"--still my favorite song by them--and "Light At The Speed Of Sound" is a fairly conscious nod to that. Not exactly the same--but similar.

Have you ever played live with HWE? Do you plan on putting a band together?

There were some shows, but it wasn't at optimum capacity and it made me realize why I did the recordings......it's difficult to find people that have a good blend of skills, personality, influences, ambition, goals and tenacity. I've also leaned more towards being a technical producer/ engineer for the longest time, and High Watt was sort of a guinea pig as far as creativity, vision and technical execution was concerned. Or it's the Steely Dan of heavy psych (laughs). To find a band that was as willing to spend as much time as was required here--in any genre--was difficult. Most just want to do a live sounding album, which is cool and all, but I wanted to see what could be done when studio availability wasn't a concern in regards to time or money. It's the exact reason why this type of album has never really been made before--the specific influences aren't original, but the presentation and flow and pacing and sequencing are.

Please list the records that have influenced you the most/your favorites?

Hmm. Wow. Where to start? I love alot of different types of music, from old blues, to 50's rock, to 60's garage/ psych, heavy metal, proto punk, punk, power pop, shoegaze, noise rock, even 80's guilty pleasures. There's no real rhyme or reason to it other than if it's something real and honest, that i'll probably like it. All the Stooges' catalogue is great, MC5, Blue Cheer Vincebus Eruptum, Big Star #1 Record, T-Rex The Slider, Sonics (anything), Nebula To The Center, Kyuss Welcome To Sky Valley, Love Forever Changes, Zeppelin, Leon Russell, Jesus Lizard Liar, Cheap Trick In Color, Hawkwind Space Ritual, Spiritualized Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space, The God Machine One Last Laugh In A Place Of Dying (super underrated), Quicksand Slip, Mogwai Young Team, Velvet Underground With Nico, Robert Johnson The Complete Recordings, Chuck Berry The Great 28, Melvins Houdini/ Stoner Witch, Spacemen 3 Playing With Fire / Forged Prescriptions, Sabbath Paranoid/ Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Slint Spiderland, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine Loveless, King Crimson In The Court of the Crimson King, The Who Quadrophenia / Who's Next, Moondog (old homeless dude who composed his own classical music that was pretty out there), Stones' Mick Taylor era, etc. There's tons more.

Not all of those influences seep into High Watt's stuff, nor would I want them to--I think that the spirit of bands and music can be transcribed to a different influence or creativity, where even in abstract art, you're taking influence from non-abstract stuff, and then making something totally different. Even if that's just running music backwards to mess it up or sending sounds through a delay set to full feedback or whatever. In that sense, I think that if you mine just the surface value of the most commercial music, you're not gonna end up with the same spirit, either, just like you can't go into Abbey Road and then touch the walls and go, "well, we've made a Beatles album!". It's up to the artist to dissect what they can from the spirit of those influences, not the surface value of what it represents. But you were one of the people and writers that I thought would connect with "Desert Opuses", because it's got a variety of gears to shift to and some disparate influences that work in the most appropriately conventional way, you know, it's not a bit jazz and then a bit country, it's all centered around moody psych stuff in where it would all sound pretty similar on an acoustic guitar, no matter if it's heavy or if it's quiet. The spirit is the same, I think, even though it's not necessarily the same in the end sonic result. It's pretty heavy in mood, but that being said, there's a variety of shades in the bleakness of the moods--some are mildly confused, some are desolate, some are playfully dark and mischievious, you know? Alot of naysayers of heavy music just write it all off as being depressing, but there's a wide variety of moods that many bands had. Look at Sabbath, albums like "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" have so many different moments and even "Master Of Reality" with "Solitude" and "Orchid"....most people would almost never know that was them.

As far as local influences, a band called Kittens--they were totally out of their element, playing Melvins/ Jesus Lizard stuff here in the early 90's, and they'd got a great buzz for themselves by getting videos on MuchMusic (Canadian equivalent of MTV). I mean, most audiences here were totally stumped. I remember when they went on a tour opening for Voivod, that the reviewer was totally clueless--"solos non-existent, melodies chucked.....". They were a totally different breed of metal/ noise. They were more riff based and heavy than the Jesus Lizard, but more abstract than the Melvins were. Their earliest recordings were cassette based and really, really grimy and grainy sounding, and of any heavy act, I actually can't think of many where their lo-fi stuff worked for them as much as Kittens did.

And I mean, this was in the early 90's when you had no internet, it was more difficult then. The drummer, Dave, used to be in my art class in high school, and here he was in one of the most cutting edge noise/ metal acts in Canada and were signed to a fairly big indie label up here, Sonic Unyon. Totally underrated, and they can stand up with any of the best noise damaged metal acts that ever were. Dave was into the Swans and really fucking out there music, but then he'd be listening to the Cocteau Twins and stuff like that. A major influence early on, and they still are. Dave has since passed away, but i'd like to think that in spirit, locally, what I do carries on in the tradition of abstract heavy noise that makes people reconsider their horizons and boundaries of what they like and what they perceived about music. Art with heavy music. I love that whole concept.

I also think that things that you don't like can be great influences, too. Sometimes you have to know what you don't like, and you have to get specific about what it is that you don't like about them, so that you don't end up with elements of those things that you don't like by accident or stumble into greatness or whatever. I'm as specific in things that I don't like as things that I do like. That being said, I love so many types of music that I don't have a lot of negativity or capacity for music that I don't like, so I don't waste too much time on thinking about the bad stuff.

What are you listening to right now (current music)?

Surprisingly enough, Jason and the Scorchers' "Lost And Found"--country music delivered with the attack of punk rock. That's another thing that I absolutely wouldn't have understood when it came out in 1985. But it's honest, heartfelt, and from the gut. Other than that, the Swans' 1990 vinyl reissue of the 1982 EP. They were doing something so forward thinking on that record, that it presaged a ton of noise acts. Also, the reissue of Suicide's first album--the 23 Minutes Over Brussels show. That goes to show you what bands were up against when presenting something new--mics being stolen, a showering of boos, etc. It's interesting hearing documents of the originators of something very new and not easily understood.

What's next for HWE?

It could be a noisier album or a quieter album. I've got both pretty much completed and mixed and vaguely sequenced. I've always thought that the true test of a band was when they could strip the noise back and deliver something that used different emotions to get the point across, and I like optimism and light to temper out some of the onslaught of darkness. When Alice In Chains released "Jar Of Flies" or the Supersuckers released "Must Have Been High", or even Slowdive's "Pygmalion" I didn't quite get them right away, i'd expected more loud stuff. But those albums are great and it took a lot of cojones to deviate from that.....they're really well written albums on a more subdued trip. I like bands and albums that take risks. That album that i've done is more Spiritualized, Floyd, Love sounding--gigantic strings, synth strings, more open space and friendly sounding, dipping back more into the quieter songs on Night Songs like "Into The Abyss", "Ascention", "Erosion", etc. Or it's like the yin to the yang of stuff like "Slow March" or "Stripped Ruins"--which are both kind of darker mellower songs.

But then, I also like the idea of swinging even further from form and structure, and doing more abrasive noise. There's plenty of that, various tracks and 10-20 minute tracks of pure craziness, and drop c drone stuff set to thunderstorms and drones set around running a finger around the rim of a wine glass and ambient noise that would go even further down that more bleak path, but I always try to temper even bleak albums with some shades of light, and trying to balance enough diversity on albums that seems to flow well without being too unnatural of an extention is sometimes difficult to do, where it shifts to the next natural gear instead of being too unnatural in it's shifting or moods. I don't think that everything that HWE does necessarily has to be jarring or abrasive.

It's getting tougher and tougher to do as I think that audiences generally want something a little more narrowed down or specific than they have in past eras, but the great thing about producing your own stuff and releasing your own albums is that there's no record company or anyone breathing down your neck to do anything that doesn't move you. The interesting part to note is that by the time that bands rehearse and release their material, they've heard it a zillion times. (laughs) Whatever I release, is something that I see myself being into as a listener that I don't tire of listening to, but bands naturally evolve and I think, have to put out something that moves them at that particular time, depending on what they're listening to and what they consider to be a challenge to themselves and the audience and to have some foresight as to what the next challenge is. That's what I really like about King Crimson, is that they never made the same album twice, but still challenged people. I have the albums by them that I like more than the others, but there's no doubt that they were there to challenge themselves and their audiences.

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