Jim Thirlwell of Foetus
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

With all the craziness happening the music world all the time, it seems that sometimes a band that broke ground back in the day might be left behind. Definitely one of those bands is Foetus and its founder Jim Thirlwell. But Thirlwell still keeps himself on the cutting edge with new technology and new releases. Foetus has just released a new album and DVD entitled Love.

Check out the official website for Foetus

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?

Jim Thirlwell: I’m lining up a lot of small things like the DVD music for the background of the DVD menus and the sticker designs. Also I’m lining up the project for this big show I’m doing in Austria, it is going to be Foetus with an 18 piece ensemble. The first set I conduct and the second set Steven Bernstein, my musical director, will be conducting and I’ll be singing. So we’ll be working on the chart of that material. It will definitely be drawn from Love, the Foetus album, with some other pieces in there. But since I record all that stuff myself, there’s the task of taking that and revoicing it for this ensemble because it’s with a cello, three trumpets, two trombones, two keyboards, woodwinds, guitars, basses, drums and two percussionists. So you have to listen to it and work out who plays what and who takes what melody, how to voice it and what timber is going to work best with what sound because the recorded stuff is heavily sample-based, whereas the live version is much more organic. But ten pieces of music for 18 people is a very big task.

DRE: Have you done the orchestra thing before?

JT: I did versions of it in LA, France, and Holland. That was the first time I had done something which was totally charted out like that. I never worried about the way my music would be interpreted in an ensemble live situation. In a heavily guitar-based band, I always felt as if I was dummying my music down a bit because I was used to different textures. I don’t want to spend months in a sweaty basement. I would rather have charts and work with other good musicians and do something a bit grander. The thing is since this is so ambitious I can’t do it that often and at this point in my life, I can’t really take it on the road. It’s 30 people the classical world on a bus and if everything’s not totally set up at a show you may have 12 people on your hands who are sitting around being disgruntled and hungry and stuff like that.

Also then this year I’m also writing a piece for the Kronos Quartet. That will be turned in by the end of the year I will be releasing it, and then that will premier next year.

DRE: Did you ever think you would still be doing stuff this deep 25 years later?

JT: Oh yeah, how could I not have? It’s all an evolution you know.

DRE: Is it tough to keep finding new stuff to help you evolve?

JT: No, my problem is finding the time to do it. There’s a million things that I want to do, a million things that I want to try and a million ways that I want to grow as an artist and evolve but it’s a matter of finding the time in the day to do it because I’m self-managed as well. To pull all this stuff together, it’s like an 18-hour day.

DRE: How do you make a living? Is it from the Foetus sales or what?

JT: It’s all from music but not necessarily purely from sales. I get some from live performance and the publishing so it’s a mixture of a lot of things.

DRE: Is it something that you worry about?

JT: Well I’ve been supported by my music since about 1982 but it’s definitely a balancing act. Any artist will tell you that to be supported by your work is not like you have a 9 to 5 job with benefits and stuff like that. It can be really lean and then you might have times where everything is right for a while. For example I was a really hot remixer for a while but that goes in phases. It’s also impacted by a lot of things like technology. The way the music is distributed now and changes in technology, all that, has closed down a lot of studios but at the same time has given a lot of people like myself a lot more power in their studios. When I started working with this stuff, it was pre-Samsung technology so when Samsung came along, there was a way of organizing sound in a way which I had been hinting at.

DRE: How did you end up scoring The Venture Bros.?

JT: They had asked me to score the pilot and the creator, Christopher McCulloch, has been a fan of mine for some time. Once the pilot was done Cartoon Network wanted to pick it up and they came back to me and asked if I was interested in scoring it. It definitely ate into my plans, but I decided, when will I get another chance to do something where I can create the musical identity in something that they give me such an open hand. So I said yes and it’s been a real challenge.

DRE: I know you scored some movies, how is this different?

JT: Doing a movie would have been a breeze compared to doing a whole series. Especially because with this one, the moods and locations change. So when I dove in, I was creating the identity and sound of the thing and I needed to decide what I could and couldn’t do. You can’t really use samples too much with something that is going in front of millions of people.

DRE: So Foetus has new DVD out.

JT: There is bonus DVD with the album. It has Blessed Evening directed by Karen O.

DRE: Was Spike Jonze really the director of photography?

JT: Yes, he was really good. He’s a good guy. Karen told me some time ago that she wanted to do a video and I had seen the one she had done for The Liars. It seemed like a good idea to me and it was within my budget. It’s interesting what she came up with. I think she was a little nervous about how I felt about it because it was her obsession and there’s a weird marriage of creepiness and this twisted humor in it. When you bring in someone else, you’re not sure what their vision is going to be because everyone can look at an object and see a different thing. I knew it would be an interesting song for her to do because it would be something that would be atypical to do a video for. I think it worked out really nicely.

DRE: What’s the never before seen footage on the DVD?

JT: There was also that video from (not adam). I’m not in it, but we had discussed it and it’s got all sorts of weird back stories going on. There is this story of a girl who kind of sees herself and there’s a lot of different repercussions of the stuff that happened in my life that were taken and imposed upon the song.

DRE: Did you ever think about directing videos?

JT: There’s really not enough hours in the day, but I would like to do it. When I create stuff that is cinematic in scope and cinematic in sound and I think it’s very provocative and I think it evokes different things in different people. So when I turn it over to someone to interpret it to their vision, it’s coming out totally different than what I might see. But I get more of an abstract feeling about the whole thing, as opposed to strict visual images. Once you put a visual image to someone who sees it, I think the two of them kind of become married forever. I like to keep the music freer than that and hold respect to it for that. I don’t think it’s necessary to put a video into everything and in some ways you would like to think you could have alternate videos, like changing your desktop picture.

DRE: I read an older article where you said you’re ready for the nanobots. Did you read about them about making robot soldiers?

JT: Yeah, I read about that. I think it’s totally the next step. That technology is very interesting and it’s great for paraplegics. Once you can get into the brain stem and tap into the right area where you can interpret those electrical signals into something that can move, like moving a cursor on a computer or something like that, that’s really futuristic. It’s like you are actualizing kind of a kinetic experience and of course the first thing they think about it turning everything into a giant machine. But I don’t think I’m going to go out and get my first sewing machine implants. I’m quite at ease with evolution and stuff like that but I’m also not too at ease with what probably comes hand in hand with the implant, which is probably subliminal signals by Pepsi.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/words/Jim+Thirlwell+of+Foetus/