Photo by Tina SchulaâI have this idea that after the apocalypse, there will be no power no electricity but there will be these sheaves of paper blowing down a dusty road and someone will grab one and it will be one of my scores and theyâll have a sort of broken violin and play it. Theyâll have no Internet but theyâll have this piece of paper. Every time I go to Coney Island I stuff a few more in a bottle.âFor over 30 years, JG Thirlwell, under the monikers Foetus (and, by extensionâ copy and pasted from WikipediaâFoetus Art Terrorism, Foetus Ăber Frisco, Foetus Corruptus, Foetus In Excelsis Corruptus Deluxe, Foetus Inc., Foetus Interruptus, Foetus Over Frisco, Foetus Under Glass, Philip and His Foetus Vibrations, Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel, The Foetus All-Nude Revue, The Foetus of Excellence, The Foetus Symphony Orchestra, and You've Got Foetus On Your Breath), Clint Ruin, Steroid Maximus, Manorexia, and others, has been making music both complex and primal, sometimes incorporating full orchestras and choirs and sometimes just doing it his own damn self; but always maintaining a reek of noir and futurist drama. Art both high and low like The Killing colorizedâscathing in intent and ecstatic in tone. Basically real groovy damage music for smart people who are probably going to die early.JG Thirlwell is a composer, both of Adult Swimâs Venture Bros. and his own pieces. He also runs his own label, Self Immolation, on which he releases his music digitally and on CDs (âPeople say CDs donât sell, for me that hasnât been the caseâŠI know what a lot of people like about vinyl is warmth. First of all, thatâs distortion. Thatâs not the sound that was on the master tape. And I donât want warmth.â). Thirlwell is, in his fashion, a serious man. Often sly and more often desert dry, heâs not humorless by any means, but that doesnât extend to suffering fools or being inclined towards fatuous discussions of his art and his intention. As I am deeply invested in being amusing, this led to a long and fascinating discussion of his life and process, often punctuated by my own nervous laughter. Throughout, Thirlwell maintained a half smile as he tolerated questions about his past and enthusiastically expounded on plans for the future.Noisey: How do you perceive yourself now? Do you consider yourself a composer or do you just not think about it?
JG Thirlwell: Yeah, I call myself a composer. I have been calling myself a composer for a while now. See if you call yourself a musician, someone instantly will say, âWell what instrument do you play?â And then Iâll say, âIâm not so much an instrumentalist, Iâm more of a composer because I play a lot of different instruments. But not necessarily any one instrument really well. I use the studio to create what I do. So maybe the studio is my first instrument?â In the end, itâs just easier to say Iâm a composer.For the uninitiated in the world of JG Thirlwell, what kind of music would you say youâre a composer of? Youâre moving more and more into orchestral stuff, but you're thought of as an industrial guy.
(Silence)(Laughs) Whether you like that or not.
I never used the term industrial about myself. It was something thrust upon me.I hate the term industrial being used about me. I feel itâs a ghetto of people in rubber platform boots and dreadlocks.I have to admit, I have liked your stuff since the 90s, but I feel like I had a blind spot when it comes to your output in the 80s. But then I have been listening some of the 80s stuff a lot, and I love it. I think youâre justified in hating the industrial tag, because that 80s stuff is kind of groovy and noirish. Itâs not just for the platform and leather dude.
HmmmmâŠ. Yeah, itâs kind of like I donât associate a lot of whatâs considered industrial to be that. There was this time that hasnât really been examined in New York music which is the late 80s, early 90s.Youâve got Cop Shoot Cop, Pussy Galore, Railroad Jerk, Unsaneâbands like that. And bands that were part of that community passing through townâthe Sub Pop, Am Rep, and Touch and Go [bands].You did something with Amphetamine Reptile right?
No, I actually did this compilation called Mesomorph Enduros. Big Cat was putting this compilation together, and I kept saying, âWell you gotta get this band, you gotta get that band,â and they finally said, âWould you want to do it?âYou know, Cop Shoot Cop actually recorded âRoom 429â for that album.Oh, wow. You curating that compilation is a pretty big deal.
Mmm, yeah, on that album there was Jesus Lizard and the Melvins.Motherhead Bug.
Yeah, it was sort of a little capsule of what was happening at the time.I was just thinking the Melvins. Thereâs a band whoâs been around and certainly have their thematic concerns. But theyâre not repetitive.
Yeah, theyâre not repetitive at all. Buzz, heâs got such an incredible work ethic, which I really like and look up to. His philosophy is, you know, any regular guy will go to his job at 9 oâclock and leave at 5, work for eight hours and put in a productive day so why shouldnât he?Do you do that?
I have productive days, yes, but thereâs a lot of procrastination involved. Unfortunately thatâs part of my process. I work every day, and I always have a lot of different projects on the boil, so on any one day I might work on three different projects. Theyâre obviously staggered in the states of completion theyâre in. Iâll go from mixing to arranging, and sometimes thereâs the administrative work that can suck up a lot of the day.Do you release most of the stuff you record?
Not everything I record has a home. Sometimes Iâll work a long time on something, and Iâll think it doesnât quite fit right. And then itâll end up on something else where it fits perfectly. Or sometimes something will gestate for five years and Iâll come back to it. And sometimes things just collect dust.Iâm a big fan of using things for scraps.
Yeah⊠you know Iâve learned a lot of different tricks about the creative process over the years, but sometimes my muse is fickle. Sometimes you have this moment where, âAll right, thatâs it, Iâm never going to write anything again,â and then you wait three weeks and you write something thatâs much more true to what you want, and then youâre like, âThatâs it, Iâm a genius!â So yeah, you hate yourself, and you think all is lost, and then you have your eureka moment and thatâs when the dam breaks.Has this always been your process?
(Laughs) Actually no, the very early days I would go in with everything notated in my head. A long numerical system, where I had the whole thing mapped out. This was pre-MIDI, pre-sampling, in an 8-track studio. Iâd go in and throw down a track and talk my way through the changes, and then Iâd go back instrument-by-instrument and listen to my cues. My first single, I recorded and mixed both sides in a day.In the first two-and-a-half years of doing Foetus, I made three 7âs, two albums, and a 12â EP. Thatâs a hell of a lot of work, especially for someone who had a full-time job. But I wasnât really second-guessing myself at the time; I was just on this momentum. It seems like the more I went through life, the more experiences I had, the more music I made, the more baggage I hadâand not wanting to repeat myselfâthe more time it takes to examine what it is youâre doing. So the process changes a lot.There are a lot of milestones in my work, where you can see that I took a detour. Around the late 80s, I did this project, Steroid Maximus. It was breaking from the Foetus persona and 50 percent instrumental. The same thing happened about ten years later when I wanted to try a different compositional process, and that was Manorexia. The first Manorexia album I did on Thanksgiving of '00. And I did that album as one long, 60-minute piece. That was incredibly liberating.Now, itâs a little over ten years later, and Iâve done the same thing with the JG Thirlwell project Cholera Nocebo that involved improvisation and spontaneity and where Iâm not spending five years making an album.And these are all given different names because they're different types of music?
Obviously Steroid Maximus and Manorexia, as I described, were coming from different places, so they were given different names. Cholera Nocebo is a JG Thirlwell thing. Maybe thatâs the fourth decade franchise. Finally going solo.Thereâs actually people who like Manorexia that donât like Foetus, and some people who like Foetus who probably donât like The Blue Eyes. Which is great.Itâs very polite of you to group these for the consumers!
Well, yeah, but you can still pick up a JG Thirlwell album and not know what youâre going to get. So far, it took until 2009 for there to be a JG Thirlwell album, but the first one was The Venture Bros. soundtrack, the second one was the Tzadik Manorexia, which was chamber arrangement, and the third one is The Blue Eyes, which was a soundtrack for a film by Eva Aridjis. The next one is going to be Cholera Nocebo, which is more electro-acoustic. Theyâre all totally different.One thing I really love, which is a recurring sort of thing, is a lot of your lyrical stuff, even from the beginning, there are these plays on words. I donât know if youâve seen the early Bugs Bunny stuff, when he was kind of evil. He was a real rascal, getting people into trouble and stuff. Then he just sort of became Groucho Marxy.
Youâre equating my evolution to Bugs Bunny? I started as a rascal, became more of a grouch, and then I became Tiny ToonsâŠI do watch a lot of animation, actually, because Iâm in that game.Did you before?
Well, I did when I was a kid. I have said before, like a lot of people I know, my first introduction to classical music was through Warner Brother cartoons, like Whatâs Opera Doc? Thereâs tons of classical music in those cartoons, but also thereâs all that fast cutting, which is really nice.A lot of what seeped into my DNA musically, from listening to music from my youth, is stuff that was very production based. Bands that chopped and changed a lot, and used production techniques.What example can you give?
Well even the Beatles did that a lot. All the sudden a French horn comes in, and then thereâs a tape swirling around and backwards bits and stuff like that. Alice Cooperâs School's Out.Those early Alice Cooper records are amazing.
Yeah thereâs like big band, and it breaks into West Side Story, and then itâs this, like, nasty rock track with like a brass section. That sort of chopping and changing always appealed to me.Prior to doing Foetus, I was listening to a to of contemporary classical music. That was what I was into when I moved to London. I moved to London in â78. I always knew when I had the opportunity, I was going to leave Australia and never return. At that point, I was 18; I really wanted to go to London, the epicenter of punk rock where stuff was happening. It was a great time to be there. I lived there til â83. So yeah, I was listening to a lot of like Steve Reich and Stockhausen. The day I received copies of the first Foetus 7â, I was 20 years old, it was 1980, and I had my first self-produced single in my hands. I went to this Merce Cunningham performance, and John Cage was doing the music live. In the intermission, I had my single in my bag, and John Cage was just sitting in the orchestra pit, and I was prepared to march over there and give Mr.Cage this single.But I was too chicken to do it. But not long after that, I discovered John Cageâs disdain for the recorded medium, so it was fortuitous that I didnât do that.What's his issue with recorded music?
Just that the recorded medium is inadequate for capturing the essence of what he does. Thereâs a lot of discourse about that, with avant-garde music in the 60s. Thereâs actually a pretty good article about it by David Grubbs about this very thing, about how a lot of composers from that time didnât have any recordings out until more recently, when people started going into archives and pulling out stuff and anthologizing.I came at it from a totally different viewpoint. I didnât come at it as someone whoâs performing and capturing what they wanted in the studio. I came at it from, âI want to make a record.â I have an idea that I want to create in the studio. Thatâs why I didnât play live for the first, like, eight years.I felt like I had ideas that I wanted to realize that I didnât think anyone else was doing. I look back at the early stuff, and itâs pretty crude, but it sure doesnât sound like anyone else.Had Mute started by then?
Well, the first Mute record was T.V.O.D., and that came out in â78. When I got to London, the independent scene was just starting. The post-Rough Trade scene had just started, so it was a really vital time for being able to start your own label and release something. It was also a time you could actually keep a handle on everything that was coming out.If you think of punk rock as the Big Bang, and then things that happened after that as the creation or expansion of the universeâif things were sort of catalyzed by punk, by punk rock, by the democratization of record distribution, the democratization of not having to be proficient with your instrument or inventing new ways of playing your instruments, then you have Cabaret Voltaire on one hand, and the Raincoats or Essential Logic or Scritti Politti.The unifying principal was that it wasnât Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
Yeah, these different things were happening, that were incredibly different musically. But also a lot of it seemed to be starting from ground zero. So that was a really exciting time. I felt like it was coming to an end around â82 or â83 when this sort of irony was stomping all over everythingâpeople really wanting to get into the charts. Scritti Politti wanted to get into the chartsâŠABC wanted to get into the charts.Also there was a creative fertility that came out from that time, even for people not interested in punk rock. There was a fertility that came out of independent distribution and independent promotion that gave you stuff like EinstĂŒrzende Neubauten, which was even further out there.You were making wry references to DIY as early as âNail.â
I was very conscious of the political ideology of being an independent label when I started. I was very scared of my work being compromised, which is stupid, but I was.Why is that stupid?
I was very idealistic. And Iâm still very idealistic. ButâŠIâm not scared of that now.JGâs newest activities are David Bowie tribute 7â with the Melvins and a performance June 13th in Austin with Sara Lipstate, AKA Noveller, followed, on the 14th with JG conducting a performance of his chamber works with a collection of Austin musicians.Zachary Lipez is loitering around the old Mars Bar location, reminiscing about the '90s. He's on Twitter - @ZacharyLipezTina Schula is a photographer based in New York. Find more of her work here.--Want more interviews with '80s and '90s indie legends?We Asked Buzz Osborne of the Melvins What He Thinks of Drake, Miley Cyrus, and Mumford & SonsDaniel Ash Is Revisiting His Past to Move Forward, but Bauhaus Is Never Getting Back TogetherEx-Sebadoh Co-founder Eric Gaffney Is Now Jesus Christ, Sort of
Advertisement
Advertisement
JG Thirlwell: Yeah, I call myself a composer. I have been calling myself a composer for a while now. See if you call yourself a musician, someone instantly will say, âWell what instrument do you play?â And then Iâll say, âIâm not so much an instrumentalist, Iâm more of a composer because I play a lot of different instruments. But not necessarily any one instrument really well. I use the studio to create what I do. So maybe the studio is my first instrument?â In the end, itâs just easier to say Iâm a composer.For the uninitiated in the world of JG Thirlwell, what kind of music would you say youâre a composer of? Youâre moving more and more into orchestral stuff, but you're thought of as an industrial guy.
(Silence)(Laughs) Whether you like that or not.
I never used the term industrial about myself. It was something thrust upon me.I hate the term industrial being used about me. I feel itâs a ghetto of people in rubber platform boots and dreadlocks.I have to admit, I have liked your stuff since the 90s, but I feel like I had a blind spot when it comes to your output in the 80s. But then I have been listening some of the 80s stuff a lot, and I love it. I think youâre justified in hating the industrial tag, because that 80s stuff is kind of groovy and noirish. Itâs not just for the platform and leather dude.
HmmmmâŠ. Yeah, itâs kind of like I donât associate a lot of whatâs considered industrial to be that. There was this time that hasnât really been examined in New York music which is the late 80s, early 90s.
Advertisement
No, I actually did this compilation called Mesomorph Enduros. Big Cat was putting this compilation together, and I kept saying, âWell you gotta get this band, you gotta get that band,â and they finally said, âWould you want to do it?âYou know, Cop Shoot Cop actually recorded âRoom 429â for that album.Oh, wow. You curating that compilation is a pretty big deal.
Mmm, yeah, on that album there was Jesus Lizard and the Melvins.Motherhead Bug.
Yeah, it was sort of a little capsule of what was happening at the time.I was just thinking the Melvins. Thereâs a band whoâs been around and certainly have their thematic concerns. But theyâre not repetitive.
Yeah, theyâre not repetitive at all. Buzz, heâs got such an incredible work ethic, which I really like and look up to. His philosophy is, you know, any regular guy will go to his job at 9 oâclock and leave at 5, work for eight hours and put in a productive day so why shouldnât he?Do you do that?
I have productive days, yes, but thereâs a lot of procrastination involved. Unfortunately thatâs part of my process. I work every day, and I always have a lot of different projects on the boil, so on any one day I might work on three different projects. Theyâre obviously staggered in the states of completion theyâre in. Iâll go from mixing to arranging, and sometimes thereâs the administrative work that can suck up a lot of the day.
Advertisement
Not everything I record has a home. Sometimes Iâll work a long time on something, and Iâll think it doesnât quite fit right. And then itâll end up on something else where it fits perfectly. Or sometimes something will gestate for five years and Iâll come back to it. And sometimes things just collect dust.Iâm a big fan of using things for scraps.
Yeah⊠you know Iâve learned a lot of different tricks about the creative process over the years, but sometimes my muse is fickle. Sometimes you have this moment where, âAll right, thatâs it, Iâm never going to write anything again,â and then you wait three weeks and you write something thatâs much more true to what you want, and then youâre like, âThatâs it, Iâm a genius!â So yeah, you hate yourself, and you think all is lost, and then you have your eureka moment and thatâs when the dam breaks.Has this always been your process?
(Laughs) Actually no, the very early days I would go in with everything notated in my head. A long numerical system, where I had the whole thing mapped out. This was pre-MIDI, pre-sampling, in an 8-track studio. Iâd go in and throw down a track and talk my way through the changes, and then Iâd go back instrument-by-instrument and listen to my cues. My first single, I recorded and mixed both sides in a day.In the first two-and-a-half years of doing Foetus, I made three 7âs, two albums, and a 12â EP. Thatâs a hell of a lot of work, especially for someone who had a full-time job. But I wasnât really second-guessing myself at the time; I was just on this momentum. It seems like the more I went through life, the more experiences I had, the more music I made, the more baggage I hadâand not wanting to repeat myselfâthe more time it takes to examine what it is youâre doing. So the process changes a lot.
Advertisement
Obviously Steroid Maximus and Manorexia, as I described, were coming from different places, so they were given different names. Cholera Nocebo is a JG Thirlwell thing. Maybe thatâs the fourth decade franchise. Finally going solo.Thereâs actually people who like Manorexia that donât like Foetus, and some people who like Foetus who probably donât like The Blue Eyes. Which is great.Itâs very polite of you to group these for the consumers!
Well, yeah, but you can still pick up a JG Thirlwell album and not know what youâre going to get. So far, it took until 2009 for there to be a JG Thirlwell album, but the first one was The Venture Bros. soundtrack, the second one was the Tzadik Manorexia, which was chamber arrangement, and the third one is The Blue Eyes, which was a soundtrack for a film by Eva Aridjis. The next one is going to be Cholera Nocebo, which is more electro-acoustic. Theyâre all totally different.
Advertisement
Youâre equating my evolution to Bugs Bunny? I started as a rascal, became more of a grouch, and then I became Tiny ToonsâŠI do watch a lot of animation, actually, because Iâm in that game.Did you before?
Well, I did when I was a kid. I have said before, like a lot of people I know, my first introduction to classical music was through Warner Brother cartoons, like Whatâs Opera Doc? Thereâs tons of classical music in those cartoons, but also thereâs all that fast cutting, which is really nice.A lot of what seeped into my DNA musically, from listening to music from my youth, is stuff that was very production based. Bands that chopped and changed a lot, and used production techniques.What example can you give?
Well even the Beatles did that a lot. All the sudden a French horn comes in, and then thereâs a tape swirling around and backwards bits and stuff like that. Alice Cooperâs School's Out.Those early Alice Cooper records are amazing.
Yeah thereâs like big band, and it breaks into West Side Story, and then itâs this, like, nasty rock track with like a brass section. That sort of chopping and changing always appealed to me.
Advertisement
Just that the recorded medium is inadequate for capturing the essence of what he does. Thereâs a lot of discourse about that, with avant-garde music in the 60s. Thereâs actually a pretty good article about it by David Grubbs about this very thing, about how a lot of composers from that time didnât have any recordings out until more recently, when people started going into archives and pulling out stuff and anthologizing.
Advertisement
Well, the first Mute record was T.V.O.D., and that came out in â78. When I got to London, the independent scene was just starting. The post-Rough Trade scene had just started, so it was a really vital time for being able to start your own label and release something. It was also a time you could actually keep a handle on everything that was coming out.If you think of punk rock as the Big Bang, and then things that happened after that as the creation or expansion of the universeâif things were sort of catalyzed by punk, by punk rock, by the democratization of record distribution, the democratization of not having to be proficient with your instrument or inventing new ways of playing your instruments, then you have Cabaret Voltaire on one hand, and the Raincoats or Essential Logic or Scritti Politti.The unifying principal was that it wasnât Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
Yeah, these different things were happening, that were incredibly different musically. But also a lot of it seemed to be starting from ground zero. So that was a really exciting time. I felt like it was coming to an end around â82 or â83 when this sort of irony was stomping all over everythingâpeople really wanting to get into the charts. Scritti Politti wanted to get into the chartsâŠABC wanted to get into the charts.
Advertisement
I was very conscious of the political ideology of being an independent label when I started. I was very scared of my work being compromised, which is stupid, but I was.Why is that stupid?
I was very idealistic. And Iâm still very idealistic. ButâŠIâm not scared of that now.JGâs newest activities are David Bowie tribute 7â with the Melvins and a performance June 13th in Austin with Sara Lipstate, AKA Noveller, followed, on the 14th with JG conducting a performance of his chamber works with a collection of Austin musicians.Zachary Lipez is loitering around the old Mars Bar location, reminiscing about the '90s. He's on Twitter - @ZacharyLipezTina Schula is a photographer based in New York. Find more of her work here.--Want more interviews with '80s and '90s indie legends?We Asked Buzz Osborne of the Melvins What He Thinks of Drake, Miley Cyrus, and Mumford & SonsDaniel Ash Is Revisiting His Past to Move Forward, but Bauhaus Is Never Getting Back TogetherEx-Sebadoh Co-founder Eric Gaffney Is Now Jesus Christ, Sort of