INDIE EYE: Twisted by the pool
eye WEEKLY
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eye WEEKLY October 10, 1996
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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INDIE EYE INDIE EYE
TWISTED BY THE POOL
by
C.J. O'CONNOR
The old shriveled dudes in these parts used to call it cabin fever --
that special strain of mania that collects in close, narrow spaces and
causes gnarled thoughts to ferment in the skull. You got it from
eternities cooped up with the same people in the same place, unable to
escape, so you paced around, cut notches into the wall, counted
knotholes in the woodwork, memorized every line in every face and
nurtured a familiarity so contemptuous you could taste the others'
thoughts. Usually, they tasted like freshly sharpened axes.
Now (he wrote, hauling the insanity/genius dichotomy out of deep
freeze), living in other people's heads can produce something called
My Pet Genius -- three people named Evan Sue-Ping, Zach Kourous and
Dean Mannella who've turned cabin fever into a viable career option.
Think lyrics improv-written by all three, like Mad Libs played in a
trauma unit. Think the neuroses of the average self-consumed rock
musician -- love as torture, beauty as superficiality, masturbation as
religion -- multiplied by three. Think My Bloody Valentine,
Chapterhouse and Spacemen 3 records spun over and over obsessively
'til cleansed of all structure. Think what kind of brain-sharing can
answer the following question -- "How do you improvise your songs?" --
like this... and all delivered simultaneously.
Evan: "A lot of people get really confused..."
Dean: "It always made sense to us when you see it from the camera's
eye."
Evan: "...like, 'Holy Jeez! What's this?'..."
Dean: "...you realize what it really is. So that really dictates the
songwriting
Evan: "... and that's kind of the way we write..."
Dean: " ...To get back to your question, we have nothing against
traditional structures."
But then, confronted with a record like Might Strike Satellite,
something like ordered rationality fails to register. Starting off
with the words "Mommy, lock me in the cellar/ Humble me/ Oh my" and
going on from there, Satellite could handily program an afternoon
Learning Annex course in Fucked-Up Shit.
"Yeah," concedes drummer Dean, "I think everything we do is in a
pretty Fucked-Up Shit direction -- musically, lyrically, thematically.
In everything we do, we take what's 'normal' and twist it and bend it
'til it appeals to us."
"It's usually in its most perverse moment when we all go, 'Hey! That's
pretty interesting...' " guitarist Zach adds helpfully.
Fine, but what are we dealing with here? True confessions?
Transplanted bits of other people's lives? A bit of both? I mean, you
really aren't saying you've got the same problems as the character in
"Hive" -- this guy who ignores his girlfriend in favor of 'bashing the
bishop' to various religious readings?
"Ahhh," Dean ahhhs. "That's our only song where we really do the God
Thing. People pick up on keywords like 'resurrection' and 'salvation'
and they make their own interpretation out of them. But it's maybe a
bit of both. You meet so many weird people everyday, sitting around
watching fucked-up people becomes kind of a hobby. Everybody's got
baggage. And we're fucked-up ourselves -- that comes through
completely in the music."
"You see all those foibles in other people and you start recognizing
them in yourself," adds Evan, the singer. "You witness other people
doing insane things and you go, 'Shit, I'm a lot like that.' "
But of course. In the music industry, everyone's a wild and crazy
guy/girl bravely exposing their inner scars/battling their
demons/attaining Theta Clear/pick your paradigm, while a steady stream
of press releases attest to the artist's lifetime commitment to
Fucked-Up Shit. C'mon, if everyone's crazy, then isn't the diagnosis
meaningless?
"But everyone is," Zach insists. "It's just whether they accept it, or
bury it, or flaunt it. Everybody knows they've got problems, but some
people just go on smiling while they're completely falling apart. What
we really like is those people who don't realize how screwed-up they
are.
"That's who we write our music for."
My Pet Genius' Might Strike Satellite CD is out this week at the usual
outlets.
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