1991 - State

Martin Deyotte, 5th beatle, pimp, and glee club for the 4th man, New Year’s Eve, 1991

I met Gabriel through Martin in 1990. There were a series of converging events, and by mid 1991, we had pooled our music equipment in Gabriel’s apartment and started to work on music for “The Fourth Man” in semi-earnest.
Leading up to this, Gabriel and Martin had become acquainted with Kevin Ogilvie/Nivek Ogre from Skinny Puppy, who had temporarily lent Gabriel a collection of gear, including a four track cassette recorder which actually recorded. Around the same time, I had upgraded my MIDI sequencing capabilities from the humble QX 21, with its two tracks and 6000 note memory, to an Atari 1040 ST computer running a program called Creator, which NEVER ran out of notes.

The result was that all 3 of us were not only enthusiastic, but also had access to enough equipment to put together some ideas, and possibly a demo tape.

There were a few sticking points. Both Martin and Gabriel were pretty much sold on the idea of doing dark and aggressive electronic music, and I seemed to have a concern about sounding too clichéd. The argument resolved itself when I realized that for the first time I had a potential musical collaborator who was ready, willing, and able to really work on something. Also, it was starting to feel like I was avoiding the inevitable, and that this seemed to be the most logical and feasible path to take. I wasn’t about to sit down any time soon and learn to sing like an angel, or play more than a few chords on the guitar, so what the hell. At one point when I was humming and hawing and trying to justify my lack of musical output, Kevin Ogilvie said quite matter-of-factly “Time’s a-wastin’.” I was a little star-struck at the time, and grudgingly took it as a subconscious mandate – at least for a few years.

A second issue was that I hated the sound of my own voice. Any pretence of being a singer had fallen away long ago, and the only reason I ended up doing it was because I felt slightly more confident than my band mates.

The self-loathing of my own voice comes across in all the songs on the CD. I did anything I could do to obscure the vocals in the songs and make them sound as unlike myself as possible, either by soaking them in effects or simply by burying them in the mix.

The first track we worked on together was “State”. The song is extremely simple and clunky, partially an intentional choice, but also because Gabriel and I were sort of figuring out how a collaborative process worked. Plus, we were still using the QX-21 at this time.

Worth noting, this was the only track that we used a real guitar on. I can’t recall how it happened, but for some reason I started banging the head of my microphone onto the neck of the guitar at the beginning of every second bar. It created a sort of gong/drone sound that fit in quite well. It also contributed to creating a horrible soup of a mix.

I distinctly recall the lyrics being triggered from walking to my soon-to-be-ex-job on Robson Street, a shopping area predominately for tourists in downtown Vancouver. As was typical at the time, I was experiencing a semi-inexplicable helpless sense of rage, in this case when I saw a billboard for “the United Colors of Benetton”. The picture was of skinny and pouty models of different nationalities, posing together in harmony. This seemed sort of disingenuous in contrast to the skinnier and more justifiably pouty overseas sweatshop workers making the clothes. I took the have/have not theme and continued to go with it. It wasn’t so much railing about the injustice of a clothes company as it was a reaction to feeling like a tiny helpless piece of meat stuck in a huge convoluted machine.

The ► first version was minus the bass line, and had a different set of vocals.

Gabriel and Martin made some vocal revisions, or more to the point, they really disliked some of my lines. I withered quickly and gave in, but not without some sort of tragicomic resentment. Once someone gave me a cigarette and a beer all was well.

The vocals were the first and last for quite some time that had any shouting on them, as Gabriel received some noise complaints, which in retrospect is ridiculous. Still, I was advised to sing more quietly, whisper, or get the vocals done in as few takes as possible. I recall being pretty pissed off that I was being discouraged from doing angry industrial vocals when I’d sort of been talked into doing them in the first place. I’m sure another factor that turned my volume knob down was that I felt like a fucking idiot sitting in the walk-in closet in Gabriel’s apartment, trying to sound mean. Still the precedent was set, so “Anvil”, Zone”, “Guilt”, “Citizen”, “Progress”, and “Plague” (except one word in the chorus) were all whispered or sung somewhat quietly (and really self-consciously) so as not to offend the sensitive ears of the neighbors. Vocals generally got done as quickly as possible, just to get them out of the way. Had a real producer been around, or perhaps had we been in a different environment, the vocals might have turned out far better – or worse. Who knows?