The complete question-and-answer session, from which the SMG article in Chaotic Critiques #9 was constructed. Metropolis is the fourth album in the discography of the ever-evolving Sister Machine Gun, and it is an amazing piece of work loaded with suave vocals, a taste for experimentation, and one of the most distinctive sounds going in industrial music. Below is an interview completed over the phone with SMG's founder and creative core, Chris Randall. Metropolis really seems to be an album of growth for SMG, and I was wondering what you see as some of the main characteristics that separates it from your past albums? Well, I could answer the obvious answer, I mean, sonically it's much more diverse and sophisticated. But that's not really it, y'know? I was more focussed on this record than I have been in the past, and I think that's the key difference...for me, anyway. All four of my records are very different from each other, and this one isn't an exception to that rule. And while I try to make each of them different, this one isn't as different from Burn as Burn is from Torture Technique, but it's definitely a progression, and I try to make all of the records like that. So in as much as following those rules, this actually isn't any different. That's one way to look at it, in that all four records are different from each other. Would you say that SMG's continual musical growth has been a response to your growth as a person, your growth as a songwriter, or both? Well, to be honest with you, I think it's that we never had a hit single. It sounds kind of stupid, but bands that have a successful song or album early, or earlier, spend a lot of time trying to recapture that moment. We've never had that, we're still searching for our 'moment', and as a result, I'm trying all avenues...I mean, it's not a reason, but it's an answer. So you're still looking for that song that will bring you the... No, not really. I'm interested in a lot of different kinds of music, and I have the ability now to...because people don't expect every Sister Machine Gun album to be a collection of a certain kind of song, I have the ability to do whatever I'd like on each album. That's why each album has its own flavor, but inside that flavor there are a lot of different kinds of music that are explored...and we like to do that, we try to make everything a little bit different. How has response been to Metropolis so far? Quite good, actually. You know, obviously without a lot of airplay, no video, and no single to speak of, the sales are still stronger than all of the other three albums combined...so I must be doing something right, but I don't know what it is though. Have you noticed any difference between the response of the industry, and the response of the fans? Oh yeah, there's always quite a few vagaries between those two. The industry, much as it would like to think otherwise, really has no control over what people like. A good example of that would be the Spice Girls, who I, who everyone in the industry, absolutely despises, thinks they're one of the worst kinds of tripe, but they're one of the best-selling groups. So [laughs] that just goes to show you...or Hanson, there's another example of that, where the industry doesn't know what the hell it's doing. And you can't fault people for liking pop music, y'know - pop is short for popular. We've always been kind of at odds with the music industry, nothing new there. That's common to most bands, I think. I think that any band that...ask them what their problem is with the music industry, and they'll immediately answer, "the music industry". But we get things done. You spoke before that you didn't have a single out yet - do you plan on releasing one? Well, we're actually...because of the UPS strike, we had a bunch of remixes done and we haven't received them yet. They were all done about the time that the strike started and were sent, so we haven't go them yet. Kind of a pain, but they should be coming in shortly. What will be the single? "Think" will be the one with remixes, and that song has been the one that the record label has been telling the radio stations to play. I don't know if they're playing it or not. The packaging for Metropolis didn't include lyrics - why did you decide not to include them this time 'round? Well, I didn't want to put them in Burn either, but I was kinda backed into a corner on that one. I don't really like putting the lyrics in the album...there's a lot of reasons for that. And for the same reasons, I don't like big extravagant packaging concepts. A song is a means for conveying imagery, its whole purpose is to spark your imagination and build a picture in your mind. By reading the lyrics that I wrote, you're trying to figure out what I was saying about myself, rather than trying to make the song mean something to yourself. This sounds kind of vain, but for that reason, I don't really like to put lyrics on the records, and I managed to get my way with this album. If I can always avoid that, I will. And plus, it's amusing to hear what people come up with, what they hear when they can't understand exactly what I'm saying. What they hear is in their own frame of reference, and it makes the song each individual person's. "Not My God", our very first single, was the funniest of those, because of all the different things that people thought that it meant. And that's the cool thing about it, and you lose that when the lyrics are in there. How would you describe SMG's evolution as a songwriting unit? It originally started off as primarily your brainchild, but it seems to have turned into more of a band thing. Yeah, absolutely. I've always tried to have a band, I just never got one right until now. Guitar players are the worst, we've had fourteen of them. Fourteen guitar players, three drummers, only one bass player, and various other sundry sidemen. The reasons for that are many and varied, but I've finally found the right combination, we have the right energy between the four of us. Obviously I still do a majority of the songwriting myself because of the way that the band is structured, but it's nice to have a guitar player there to write guitar parts...when you have a keyboard player trying to write guitar parts, it's just not going to work out very well. Ironically, this album, having the most guitar playing of our four albums, I played 90% of it myself. I read in an interview that you did around the time of Burn, and you figured that your next album would be going in more of an electronic direction - was the heaviness of the guitar unplanned? Yeah. The thing is, when I write the songs, I sit in the recording studio and write, and I don't actually write songs at home very well - just too many interruptions. So we go to a recording studio to write and, me being a keyboard player, a programmer type of person, what I do is mainly programming. And then when John Fryer gets into the picture, when we go to mix, I'll just add some guitar here, add some guitar there, and his influence is what makes it. I'm personally not very fond of playing the guitar - it gets very tedious, and my fingers hurt, and it's not very much fun. But for this album, we didn't have a guitar player and I ended up doing most of it. It's one of the things that I do because it fills out the album nicely. Vocals and guitars don't really mix very well in electronic music because they take up the same frequency range. That's why a lot of heavy metal bands have a singer that sings very high, because there's so much guitar and that's the only way that you can actually hear the singer. It sounds silly, but it's very true. And I try not to let the guitar run the show, like so many bands do. We're still an electronic band, and 90% of what you hear has gone through a sampler. Probably one of the most striking tunes on the album for me was "White Lightning" with the ultra-noisy blues guitar lead, which was contributed by Reeves Gabrels, right? Was the concept of incorporating this sort of riff into the song your idea, or Reeves? That was actually...the song as it was originally written, the part in the beginning didn't have any guitar at all, and in-between was just me talking. But Reeves Gabrels, David Bowie's guitar player, was in town and we had him come down and play on a few songs, and that was one of them. I was originally trying to get Matt Johnson, from The The, to come in and play harmonica at the beginning, which I thought would be fun. And then when we did the strings for "Admit", one of the violin players had an electric violin in that part, and it didn't quite work. So then Reeves came down and played the rhythm and lead parts for "Admit" and I'm like, "well, while you're hear, why don't you try this out, we've been having trouble with this song". And the song was originally much slower, we sped it up because it just seemed to kind of plod. We sped it up, and Reeves listened to it once through and was like, "I've got something", and he played that part and it stayed the same. We actually didn't cut it up or anything, which we usually do. And that was just one take, live. For "Admit" you used a full orchestra, right? Not a full orchestra, a string section. It was four pieces, we had written the part for a twelve piece string section, but I couldn't afford a twelve piece string section, studio prices in New York City being what they are. So I had four people come in, and they played all twelve parts. It worked out pretty well, actually. I was surprised, I had never done anything like that before. I wanted to do it more to see if I could do it, rather than it being an important aspect of the song, because I could have just played those parts on a keyboard. It's sound is much better; the original parts that I wrote for the keyboard were thin sounding when you compare them to twelve strings playing in unison...it's just a nifty thing to do. Was it a time consuming process for scoring the music for it? Um, well, what happened is, I don't read or write music. I mean, I can, I can get by, but I don't do it as a matter of course like some musicians. So we hired an arranger, it was Philip Glass, a string arranger I guess. The label hired her, and I gave her a tape that had the parts that I had written on keyboard. And obviously not knowing the ranges of violin, the fiola, and the cello can play, I just kind of made up what sounded good. She took that, and listened to it, and laughed at me basically, saying "this won't work at all". And she rewrote the parts completely for the strings to do, and then she came in and conducted them and everything. So it was quite interesting. I've never done anything like that before and I think that I will do more of it in the future. I mean, I've worked with horn sections and I'm quite good at that, and I love the sound of brass instruments. But I've never done the strings before, and so we're going to try and get some songs on the next album that have both in the same song, some big arrangements. One thing that is very noticable on Metropolis is the beefed up production, particularly the bass sound. I find it kind of neat that you're using some club-friendly rhythms, but lining them up next to some very grating sounds and heavy guitars, it provides for an interesting dichotomy. Well, that's our normal way of doing things, we just had a lot more resources. Burn would sound like that if I had the time and the money to do that. We did it at 48-track instead of 24-track, which we normally do, so every sound is in stereo, and just a lot more of everything, and we added a lot of bottom end when we mastered it. Like I went and had the guy that does all of the east coast rap stuff, he mastered it - he does like, Public Enemy, and all that sort of stuff - and he really knows how to do it. Burn we had mastered by a west coast rap guy that does Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, that sort of stuff. It gives it a bit of a flavor. Mastering is actually a very important part of the recording process that a lot of people overlook. It determines the flavor of the record, and a good masterer can bring out a lot. Both Burn and Metropolis are mastered like rap albums, with a lot of bottom end added, but in different ways. Burn is a west coast way, and Metropolis is an east coast way. I think that on the next album, I'm going to try and get a classical guy to do it, because they get so much dynamics out of classical records. They're huge sounding, so I'm going to see if I can't get that to work. One thing that seems to be popular lately is full-length remix albums - can you see anything of this sort in SMG's future? No, I think that that's a copout. You got three singles, and each of those has remixes, and everybody already bought them, everybody was already interested. And then you try and put those on a record, and make that interesting. I think that's just another attempt to make money, abusing the fans when you're just putting out things that you've already released. I have no interest whatsoever in that, and I'm not a real big fan of remixes. We do them, but they never turn out quite the way that I would like them, because I'm always under the impression that I did this song right the first time. For "Think" we went completely the other direction, we got total dance artists and house music people to do the remixes. The single will also be sold in stores, which is something that we haven't done in awhile, not since "Torture Technique". And it will also have b-side as well, a song that we've been performing live called "Automaton" that I recorded after Metropolis. I'm trying to make a flavor for the single that makes it totally alien to the album. It makes it something that someone would want to have, rather than just trying to cheat them out of different edits of the same song. What would you say is the driving force that inspires you to continually stretch in new directions? I don't know, it must be all of the money that I make [laughs]. I don't know, it's just what I do. I can't ever keep my attention focussed on one kind of music. I hear something new and I want to emulate it, or I want to try something different, and that's what makes me keep changing the flavor of everything. Has your appreciation for diverse forms of music like classical and funk always been there, or have they developed over time? Well, when you're younger...I'm what most people would term old now, at 29, and when you're younger, you don't necessarily see...what I listened to in high school and junior high was all new wave and punk, early punk, I never got into hardcore - never saw the point of it. And not until I got into my early 20s and started a band did I start to really appreciate, like...y'know my dad was the biggest Beatles fan in the world, and I never really saw it, never really caught the spark until I was 22, 23. And then I started to understand the Beatles, and now I have every Beatles album and listen to them religiously. Not a day goes by that I don't listen to Abbey Road or something. Pink Floyd is another that you have to be a little bit older in order to really, truly get them. And of course, I love...Lisa, my wife, and I, on our first anniversary we took a vacation to Memphis, and went around to the old studios and everything...[laughs] my idea of a vacation, it wasn't really hers. And I really caught the bug for the whole Memphis soul sound. And that's what really started me using a lot of horns and stuff, which I wouldn't have really done before. And trying to add flavors like that, into what most people call industrial music. It's a hard job, but it keeps me liking what I do. Like some of the songs on the first record I have played live thousands of times, and it's hard to keep interested in them unless I change them a lot. Do you tend to rework versions of your older songs? Sometimes I do, I take a lot of liberties with them and it pisses people off sometimes. A good example of that would be "Sins of the Flesh" - it's a song off of our first record that was more popular, and we ended up playing it a lot live, at every show, and I just got sick of it, playing it exactly like the album - it just drove me insane. It hurt my throat to yell it, and I just didn't have any fun. So what I did is I played it half time, like a big arena rock ballad kind of thing. And some people thought that it was the best thing that they've ever heard, and other people thought that I'd slaughtered the sacred cow, so to speak. So I stopped doing that, but I'm not afraid to take liberties with the songs if I feel that they deserve it. "Wired", we're going to try and do that live, but we've never been able to pull it off because I didn't sing it on the Torture Technique album, Jim Marcus [of Die Warzau] sang it on the choruses and he's got a much better voice than I do. So I could never pull of the chorus live, so what I did was I completely reprogrammed it and made it all totally electronic. The only way that you can tell that it's the same song is by the words. What would "success" be for Sister Machine Gun? I have no idea. I've been at this for a decade and there's still none in sight. Success for me is playing shows when there's an audience there. Success for me is selling enough records so that we can make another record. I don't have any aspirations of driving a jaguar around or having a forty room house, none of those things are important to me as long as I can pay my rent and have an audience that enjoys what we do. And we have those things. If you asked me when I was 20 what success was, it would have been getting signed to Wax Trax Records, so obviously those things change. And now, having just completed my fourth album for Wax Trax, I must be doing something right. Could we go over your past albums, and could you offer your comments on them, or describe how you feel that they show the band progressing? Sins of the Flesh Well, obviously that was my first record and I did it almost entirely by myself, and it shows. It's kind of painful to listen to sometimes. I'll put it in and listen to it, and it's just weird, there's stuff on it that I just wouldn't do now. And I had very few resources, one keyboard and one sequencer and that was that. So I did the whole album on one piece of equipment and one guitar, and it sounds like it. But for what it is, it was my freshman attempt, and there you have it. The Torture Technique Uh, I'm not really fond of that album. It was a painful portion of my life. Each of my albums is a little slice of my existence, and what I was going through at that time wasn't very pleasant. Ironically, that's a lot of my more diehard fans' favorite record, and I'm not really sure why. Actually, I just listened to it yesterday from end to end, which I haven't done in years, and me and Lisa were just looking at each other wondering what people heard in it. I'm kind of embarrassed by it, to be perfectly honest. Burn Burn I quite like. Burn was our first big step. Sins of the Flesh and Torture Technique were both industrial albums, they were Wax Trax records. Burn was my first big step out into the wide world of music. Taking my skills out for a spin. There's a lot of things on this album that I would like to change, but it stands well on its own. I think that a couple of my best songs are on that record. "I Don't Believe" for one, I think it's one of the best songs that I have ever written, and "Red" is quite good also - sonically, a catchy little number. Metropolis Well, I'm pretty proud of that one. There are things that you would like to change, you look back on them and say, "damn, I wish I could change that". I recorded this album a year ago, and it only just came out, so I've been listening to this record for quite a while now. The thing about it is that it is definitely an expansion upon the ideas of Burn, which I was originally like, "oh, it's okay to put a horn section on here, nobody's going to give me a hard time", where on Torture Technique I wouldn't have even thought that. But with Burn, it was like, "okay, let's try this out". And now with Metropolis, now that I know it's okay and nobody really minds, I'm really stretching myself. And I think that for our fifth record, we'll be even further away from what Sins of the Flesh originally was, which was a Nine Inch Nails ripoff. On Burn, there was a hidden song before the start of track one - can you give some details about this song, and why you decided to stick it there? That was a "Strange Days" cover, a Doors song. What happened was, this is kind of ironic as in October we're going on tour with Prong. But it was for the movie, Strange Days - the director, James Cameron, had called TVT and asked if there was a band that could cover a song real quick. And so the person that does soundtracks at TVT called me and is like, "do you got time to do this". And I was right in the middle of doing Burn at the time and I really hate peeling myself away from the album to do something like that, because it never comes out quite right, but I was like, "okay, why the hell not?" So I did it - it means a lot of money of course, soundtracks actually pay my rent...Mortal Kombat has been providing me with a nice source of income for years now. So I did the song, I rearranged it a bit because I didn't really...the chord progression sounded campy when I did it electronically, so I changed it and then I added a little organ solo in the middle because, even though the original didn't have it, the original was just verse-chorus-verse-chorus-done, and it just needed a little bit of a break to be more modern. So I put that in there, recorded it, I got a horn section in to do the chorus part, sent it to James Cameron and he cut it in the film, and they're like, "oh this is perfect", and then Sony is like, being Sony, the biggest record company on the planet, the one releasing the film and doing the soundtrack, are like, "um, well we really think that a Sony artist should be doing the title track." So James Cameron called us back and is like, "sorry, this isn't going to happen." They apparently gave my tape to Prong, and said, "do it like this." And the Prong version is exactly like my version, with the organ solo in the same place and all that, which I found kind of annoying. But I like my version, I did it three times over to get it right for the movie, up to their snuff, and it kind of irked me that it was just like, "whatever, this isn't going to come out now." So I'm sitting there mastering Burn, and I brought all my tapes with me because you never know when something might happen. And then afterwards, the engineer is like, "oh, do you know about that song zero thing?" I'm like, "what are you talking about?" And he goes, "well, one of our engineers here figured out a way to put a song in the space before track one, you want to try that out?" And I was like, "hell, ya! Do it up." And that's how it worked out. Was it conscious to keep this track "quiet", a treat for the fans that knew about it? We only told a couple key people, and it just kind of got out, it was a controlled leak on our part, and then after about six months I started talking about it a little more. I thought that it was kind of cool, just a nifty little thing like, "I can't put this on my record, but here it is." The whole point of it was to hide it from Sony. And it was just kind of funny. And another reason that we put it there was that it was a cover, and we only get paid for ten songs in terms of royalties, so if we put on twenty it's no big deal. And the record label always wants you to put on a lot of songs so they have a lot to work with, but they only pay you for ten. So technically there are actually twelve songs on Burn, although two of them didn't really count: the little reprise at the very end and "Strange Days". And for Metropolis I was like, 'well, that's kind of unfair because a lot of people have Burn and still don't know about having that extra song on there, so why don't I just put twelve songs on Metropolis and say "fuck it", I'm giving you two songs for free, because I'm a nice guy...and then everybody writes to me and complains that there is no hidden track! What differences are there between SMG live and in the studio? Oh, quite a bit. As I mentioned earlier, I take a lot of liberties with the songs. In the studio, it's a programming exercise with a lot of typing to be done to make each record. For lack of a better term, my records are made on computer. My laptop goes with me, and that's how my records get written. But live, we're a four-piece rock combo, with bass, drums, and two guitar players. And, of course, I play keyboards on stage too. I play guitar a bit too, mainly because it looks cool [laughs]. And bearing that in mind, it's very near impossible to play these songs live...I mean, we're a studio band, and it's very nearly impossible to play them live the way that they were done in the studio. So we don't even bother, the songs just get reworked. I've always felt that, if you want to hear the CD, stay home and listen to the CD. And if you want to be entertained by the guys that wrote the record, come to the live show and we'll entertain. If we had to play the live show the way that we play on the record, we would be thoroughly unenjoyable, and there would be about eight people on stage. So, we just don't even attempt to. Which songs tend to be more effective live - the slower, funkier songs, or the noisier, upbeat tracks? Well, it depends upon the audience. Here in Chicago, we can play whatever we want, and they're just happy to see us, we play here often. Go to a place like Salt Lake City, and they want to beat the shit out of each other, so it's going to be harder set. We don't use a DAT tape live, for our backing tracks we use minidisc, so I can always change the order of the set. And we always have about fifteen or twenty songs that we can play, and so we try and take into consideration what kind of audience we have. If we're opening for another band, which we don't do very often - we did it for Type O Negative and we're going to do it for Prong - but normally we're a headlining band because I like to have control of the situation. When we open for another band, we try to figure out what they are going to do, and make it harder. So, like, with Type O, all of their songs were really slow and super-heavy, so we just played all of our fastest songs so it would make us look completely different than them. So we did a 45 minute set where there wasn't a single song under 130 bpm. and it was just a screamer. It was fun to do that, but very tiring to do every night, it beat the shit out of me. Did you see that show that we did at the Starfish Lounge up in BC? No, I didn't. Well, you're better off, actually. We didn't go very well that night. We have real problems in Canada - some places we do well, and some places we just choke, I don't know why. It's just a weird thing. Like Winnipeg, Saskatchewan, in that neck of the woods is good, but we get to the big cities and they just hate us. We actually played Victoria last year, which was pretty interesting, put our bus on that big ferry. And that was okay. We got about 50 people, but they obviously don't get too many bands like us out there. But y'know, we change the show a lot, we don't use a set list and rearrange a lot. What's your favorite song to play live? Well, it depends on the night. Some nights I really enjoy the keyboard jams like "I Don't Believe" or "Burn", other nights I like to do the more raucous numbers. I always like to do "White Lightning", we've played about 80 or 90 shows now with the newer set, and I really like playing the new ones because they are a little more complicated and require a little more thinking. Because "Not My God", I don't even have to turn on my brain anymore to do it, and I have a tendency to get a little lackadaisical about everything. But with the newer songs, they are much more complex and harder to play, and it's enjoyable, actually. Is there any aspect of SMG's sound or lyrics that tends to get overlooked or misinterpreted? All the time. People tend to take what I write at face value. I write very vaguely, I don't write, like, "this is the government, they suck." I'm very vague about my lyrics, and they're very stream-of-consciousness oriented. Not as vague as, say, John Lennon on "I Am The Walrus", but vague nonetheless. And people always just take it at face value. I had one kid in...where was it?...Elkhart, Indiana? Kalamazoo, Michigan. We were playing Kalamazoo...a dumb name for a dumb city, in my opinion. But he was absolutely convinced that I was a white power type person, and that he could hear me saying "white power, white power" at the end of one song, he was convinced. He was telling me that I was wrong because he could hear it, and I was wrong for telling him that he was incorrect. I'm like, "dude, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about," and he's like, "no, you're wrong, I'm right." And I'm like, "I wrote the goddamn song, I know what the fuck I'm singing." He heard, like, there was some sample that was backwards...I actually do this quite often because it's kinda funny because you can't play CDs backwards so nobody can tell what you're saying - but it's just like news programs or something, it doesn't have anything to do with anything. And it's just amusing, to fuck with Christians like that. And he was convinced, and we actually got in a fight over it. My soundman actually pulled me off of him, because I was thoroughly going to kill him. I'm the least political person in the world, I've never voted, I don't have a racist bone in my body, I don't have any interest in that sort of conversation. And it really upset me that someone would think that I was like that. And that's probably the best example of a misinterpretation of my lyrics there. And each one of my songs is one of my little children, I nurture them and they grow into what they are, and I can get really offended if someone takes something the wrong way like that. Okay, last question - any closing comments? You know, somebody asks me that every interview, and I never have a good answer.

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