do you have your head in the sand to not know this official “QRD” band?  nice spacey guitarscape stuff with its share of angst & even if you don’t know or like them you’ll enjoy the interview, even if I do actually ask questions about the music....

QRD – why do you use a seven string guitar?

Ashkelon – my friends Cameron Bobro, the opera singer, & Paul Allen, the Trader Joe’s bag clerk, make furniture for the hell of it.  really expensive exciting furniture with hardwoods & stuff.  they decided for a while that they wanted to make guitars & sell them.  make really high priced expensive custom guitars.  so they made seven prototypes & mine is one of the seven prototypes.  they had seven designs & all of them were seven stringed & they’re all made out of indian rosewood, purple heart, etcetera etcetera.  so I experimented with different tunings for it.  first I tuned my low string to a low A like Korn does now & stuff.  but I didn’t find I had a use for another four notes down below the usual scale.  then I found out in europe a lot of the classical guitarists have switched over to seven string guitars & they have a special tuning for it & I’ve adopted that tuning.  the lowest string tunes up to a D, the next string is an F, & then from there it’s the typical A, D, G, B, & E.  so I have a low D & an F string which allows me to do a lot of chords you can’t normally do really.  it’s really cool & really convenient.

QRD – do you think there’s a significant style difference between Delirious & Venomous Eve?

Ashkelon – of course there is.  intentionally so.  it’s like any album.  that’s what they said between Ghost Forest & Bloom Flowers Bloom! for example.  Ghost Forest came out & there was some crazy adherence to Ghost Forest & we nailed all these interviews like Carpe Noctum.  & between the time they said they’d interview us & the questions were sent, we sent them Bloom Flowers Bloom! & they were like, “whoa, this is way different.”  & when the interview came out they were saying Ghost Forest was incredible & Bloom Flowers Bloom! was more of a this or a that album.  everyone has a preference for one album or another.  they’re all different & they will always all be different.  I never intend to make the same album twice.

QRD – do you think there’s a bigger difference between Bloom Flowers Bloom! & Ghost Forest or Venomous Eve than the difference between Delirious & Venomous Eves?

Ashkelon – no.

QRD – what’s your favorite Swans’ song & what Swans song would you cover if a tribute came out?

Ashkelon – that’s an awfully tough question.  I have almost every Swans album.  I can tell you what’s my least favorite Swans song...  well my least favorite album.  I don’t like Love of Life at all, even though I’m one of the biggest Swans fans in the world.  but I like all the other albums infinitely.  I guess I just don’t like that one because I don’t think it’s as good as the others.  I like White Light from the Mouth of Infinity.  in fact, today I leant my neighbor White Light from the Mouth of Infinity along with Christian Death Only Theater of Pain because he’d never heard either of them.  I recited to him the lyrics to “Failure” because I like those lyrics a lot.  the part about “when I get my hands on some money, I’ll kiss its green skin.”  I like “Love Will Save You” a lot.  what would I cover?  I’d probably cover “Amnesia” from the Omniscience disc.  but only if it was a comp of 100% excellent bands.  the Swans don’t deserve the typical morons-cut-a- tribute-disc sort of butcher job.  they’ve worked too hard.

QRD – has starting your own label been worth it to you?

Ashkelon – no.

QRD – just financially or as an experience?

Ashkelon – as an experience I’ve learned a lot, but it’s hard to get off the ground financially.  it takes a long time to see returns in the music business & collecting money is a big big bother.  anyone who’s ever had a label or even thought about it should know that.  but what it boils down to is time.  for example during the month of September this year I locked myself in my house from September 2nd to October 2nd & I worked on music 14 hours a day straight for thirty days in a row.  that doesn’t leave anybody enough time to do a record company properly.

QRD – do you think the experimental music underground has a better future in clubs or with studio releases?

Ashkelon – I don’t think one could be held in favor over the other.  but studio releases do have the advantage of being more permanent & accessible because you have to be there at the time & place to see the show.  but the shows definitely help alert people to what’s on the records.  but live music is always more powerful than the studio music if you're looking at a good band.  so I won’t say one’s better.

QRD – is there anyone that you haven’t played with live that you particularly would like to?

Ashkelon – no, I really don’t care.  I’ll go on tour with the Cure, I’ll go on tour with Fiona Apple.  I wanna play with Fiona Apple because she’s pretty, but I read her interview in A.P. & I didn’t really like it, so maybe that would be a pain.  I just choose who I’d like to play with based on if they’re a slightly different music category than us that has a crowd that we would cross over into.  so we would draw certain people & they would draw certain other people that wouldn’t normally come to see us & vice versa & that people would appreciate each band.  that’s how I viewed yhe situation when we did the Cindytalk tour.  I wouldn’t want to go on tour so much with a band that was just like us.  I love Swans & Einsturzende Neubauten, bands that are my favorites & have been a long time, sure I’d love to go on tour with them, but that isn’t where I’m coming from in my goals of being on tour because it’s about my show.  I’m working on what I’m doing & I’ll take what opportunities I can get to go on tour.

QRD – how important do you think honesty is in music & art?

Ashkelon – in the movie La Belle Nouseaus, it’s in french & 4 hours long about a painting, most of the film is a guy painting a painting & it’s the story of what goes into the painting & he says, “it’s not a masterpiece unless there’s blood on the canvas.”  meaning you have to have lost a little bit of life over it & you can’t lose a little bit of life if you’re not being honest.  if it’s not honest I don’t necessarily think there’s a point to it.  what else is there?  interpreting other people’s lives? give me an example of dishonest art.

QRD – pop culture in general.  is pop culture dishonest?

Ashkelon – oh.  we were sitting in a restaurant last night before the show waiting for sound check & they had all this really cheesy music.  this ballad duet kind of nonsense with a male & female vocalist singing “how I will always love you” & “you’re mine tonight” & “blah-blah-blah” & of course that’s dishonest.  the guy was probably in New York & the girl in LA & they probably never met, so they weren’t really in love with each other, but they’re singing as though they are.  yeah, that’s inherently dishonest, but the human feelings & emotions are probably honest.  I don’t relate to anything like that because I’m a hopeless cynic, but I suppose there are people out there that appreciate & like that stuff & would put on that record in order to seduce their boyfriend or girlfriend & they go to bed & have wonderful sex & have their happy lives & that’s great for them.  maybe there’s something wrong with me because I don’t adhere to that kind of aesthetic.  maybe I just think too much about the fact that that guy & that girl never met & never even knew each other & here they are singing in a song “I love you” & they never met & that cheapens the whole thing.  it cheapens the concept of the words “I love you” & stuff.  which is a big thing if you think about it & you’re going to say that to somebody.  so in my opinion it’s bullshit, but for some people it’s probably valid & perfectly honest because they interpret it on their own terms & their terms are honest.  so then pop culture becomes honest because it’s interpreted by the person whose listening to it.  but that’s not what I’m striving for.  I’m not trying to reinterpret somebody else’s life through music & hope I nailed it.  that’s why you can only do it with a love song because everybody knows love as a basic human experience.  that’s why pop music is ruled by songs about love & occasionally one about a car or money or a surf board.  but if you want to write about anything beyond that, you’ve got to be mother fucking honest.  that’s where I’m at, but I think that’s self evident.  the music I like is written about honest things that honest people experience, but you’re going much more out on a limb then because everyone’s experiences are unique.  if you’re going to write honest music you have to have lived a little bit.  you have to have been kicked around by life a little bit.  you have to have had your heart broken at least thirteen times.  you have to have lied & gotten caught.  you have to have been devastated & you have to have lived many different facets of life if you’re going to write something with honesty that other people can relate to.

QRD – how do you keep cats from peeing on furniture?

Ashkelon – your interviews always full of questions like this.  don’t have cats.  or have happy cats.  that’s what you’ve gotta do.  you’ve got to give them lots of attention & good food. & let them go outside; they pee on the furniture because they don’t dig the fucking cat box.  would you want to pee in a dirty little box?

QRD – not unless it’s clean.

Ashkelon – see? exactly.

QRD – do you think techno is a fad?

Ashkelon – no.  here’s the deal.  musical categories are a great thing in a record store, period.  the moment somebody invents a new kind of music they give it a category & a label.  that’s great as long as you’re shopping in a record store, then you know what section to go to to find things.  but when the category becomes something that everybody knows, you get a bunch of shlocky morons going around trying to emulate it.  they don’t know what they’re doing, they didn’t invent anything, they haven’t come up with anything.  they’re just trying to make something that sounds like everything that’s popular so the can either be cool or get laid or make a buck & that’s lame.  so the record companies, they condone that, because once you have a category you have a license to sell discs to people who liked the one thing that was original & had a lot of momentum & character & originality & they sell these other records in the hope that the people who liked the original thing will like this trendy thing that went along beside it & is just an emulation of the original.  & it happens in all kinds of music.  it happens in gothic, where you have all these shlocky gothic bands trying to sound like the Cure or Bauhaus or Sisters of Mercy.  it happens other places too like country or heavy metal; it’s the worst in heavy metal, my god that’s an atrocity & it’s almost as bad as the emulation factor in techno.  but the true classy cutting edge techno stuff coming out of germany & so forth is fucking fantastic & is a very valid form of music.  it’s just unfortunate that, just like so many other categories, techno has a bunch of emulators trying to be cool & don’t really know what techno music is about.  but I’ll tell you what it’s about.  music is ruled by time & can’t exist without time because it takes time to view it.  if you have a painting, that’s a form of art in which you can control the time you look at the painting.  but music rules time & therefore it can cause time to fluctuate or cause your perception of time to fluctuate.  because time does fluctuate in your head.  sometimes things seem to take forever, like a test or something,  or when you sleep & sometimes you think five minutes have gone by, but it’s been ten hours.  that’s your brain causing time to fluctuate, because it’s your perception of time that’s fluctuated.  if music is done well, music causes your time to fluctuate, but it can only do that if it makes your imagination swell.  if it causes your imagination to run.  & the way music causes a person’s imagination to run is not by the things they put in, but the things they leave out!  because you imagine what it could’ve been.  like if you say something it suggests other things, Robert Smith is one of the greatest at it using metaphors & so forth to suggest things in the lyrics.  or the little silences in the song are so important because your imagination is filling it with all the things that could’ve all happened in that little silence, but there was really nothing there.  true good music sets off your imagination by leaving things open to the imagination & that is the whole point of techno.  it leaves vast areas open to your imagination & interpretation.  it doesn’t try to interpret any more than it has to.  techno is another experiment to get to the absolute minimum necessary to make your imagination go crazy.  that’s the point in techno.  so good techno that does that is good, but there is a lot of crappy techno.

QRD – previously you’ve had two female singers & recently you’ve started to sing yourself, is this a compromise or temporary situation for you or something you’ve been going towards?

Ashkelon – something I’m going towards, definitely.  the last song on Delirious, I sang it.  I would’ve worked with Zoë forever & at the time when Zoë left in August of 96 it was a compromise, but I pulled out of that one well & I managed to cover the shows we had with Gordon Sharp of Cindytalk singing for us as a special emergency arrangement.  it went very very well, we played “Kangaroo” from This Mortal Coil & we did his favorite Brian Eno song, he improvised to the Trance material which he knew pretty well.  I have it on video, it’s nice.  I’m really glad we got through that time in that way.  & then Dawn, but Dawn was not necessarily intended to be a permanent singer.  we knew we were going to make at least one record & do at least one tour which we did.  but she made it clear from the start that her priorities lay in her solo project which I got shows for along the tour.  she opened as her solo project on almost all the bills on that set of shows.  then it was just apparent that it wasn’t going to last anymore than a year.  she’s just really driven to do her own project & had to devote full time to that & I think I wanted to believe that our arrangement would have a longer shelf life.  but it became time for me to do this which is what I knew I was headed towards anyhow.  with Dawn we’d sit there for hours arguing about how vocals should be & I would come up with all the music & say how the vocals should lay out & we worked on those songs together & everyone was saying to me, “you should be singing these songs, because you know what you want.”  Dawn was saying that to me, everyone close to the band was saying that to me.  so why am I writing songs for other people to sing?  I still like the idea for that & I’m working on an album currently on which I’ve written a bunch of lyrics I do have in mind for other people to sing, but this time I’m bringing on a lot of guests.  Mike from Lycia has agreed to sing on one of them & Dara Rosenwasser from Faith & Disease has sung one already that’s finished.  Marc Linder, my former bandmate from Blade Fetish is on new Trance stuff with me as well.  a cover of “Fade to Grey” (Visage) will be on this upcoming new wave “tribute” album, New Wave Goes to Hell.  also this year, two unreleased “Zoë” era Trance tracks will be out.  one on Hex Files Vol. 2 which was put together by Mick Mercer ? nice packaging ? that song’s called “velvet fuck.”  another, entitled “Slave,” will be on the next Cleopatra Goth Box set.  Mere Mortal Records in Boston is doing a comp ? I haven’t picked a song yet, but we were asked.  there’s supposed to be another comp by oblivion entertainment called Dead Southern Code with a remix of “A Force Behind the Wheel.”  of course there’s the Tess Records Aria compilation with still more exclusive tracks.

QRD – anything else?

Ashkelon – no, I got to say a lot of things.