[3.1.05]
[Brian
Barcode]: Back from a long recording hiatus, D Madden
of Portland's Penal Colony returns with a new record, and some words
on music, life and politics in the Pacific Northwest. You said one of
the reasons Penal Colony originally ended was due in part to the stagnation
of industrial music. The current flow of fresh blood into the scene
and the return of some legendary acts revitalized you some how. What
specifically made you want to come back with a new record?
[D Madden]: I don’t know that there was any one
specific thing that made me want to do another record. I’ve been
saying this for sometime now – if you ask me about the demise
of the band or why do a new record, I’m probably not going to
give you the same answer from one day to the next - because there were
so many factors that played into both. That said, I think that during
all those years I was away, I’d always thought somewhere in the
back of my head that I would do another record, most likely under some
other moniker but carrying on Penal Colony’s artistic vision somehow.
I just went for a very long time not knowing how I could ever make my
way back to that point, whether anyone would care, and feeling very
George Lucas-like about music technology in the mid to late 90’s.
The technology to work the way I’d dreamed of working for the
last 20 years simply wasn’t there yet, or out of my reach financially.
Around the turn of the century, two things happened I that made me feel
like "now’s the time". Meeting a Penal Colony fan (and
day gig co-worker) from Portland named Joe Badger, who turned me on
to the Cyberage radio show, and put me back in touch with Tommy T at
DSBP, who I hadn’t spoken to since the 5 Man Job tour in ’95.
And the advent of the virtual synthesizer and virtual sampler; namely
the VST technology invented by Steinberg. I’ve been a die-hard
user of Steinberg stuff since ’89 or ’90. So for them to
come up with the whole VST thing within what was pretty much the only
program I’ve ever used for composing music, Cubase, that really
turned the tables for me.
As
for the other event, some of my oldest friends were key players in the
birth of LA Rave culture in the early ‘90s. They were promoters
and DJs of the first big warehouse parties that were going off in downtown
LA. They’d rent a generator and literally break into these buildings,
setup and go. It was an exciting time for all of us, we’d all
come from the punk, post-punk, goth, et. al. And all of it was new and
exciting, in the same way punk was for me as a kid. I tried incorporating
elements of acid house, nubeat, hardfloor stuff into Penal Colony, with
both Penal Colony material and remixes I did for other people. The label
hated it. Hated_it. That really bummed me out. We had no interest whatsoever
in becoming the next Nitzer Ebb or Skinny Puppy or KMFDM or whatever,
we just wanted to do our own thing on our own terms, and we were always
met with resistance for that. So here I am in ’00-’01, listening
to the Cyberage show for the first time since I was in New Mexico in
’95, and there were these bands like VNV Nation, Assemblage 23,
Haujobb, doing the Synthpop or EBM thing or whatever you want to call
it. To me, it sounded like a bunch of guys doing the ’92-’93
nubeat, hardfloor, rotterdam, trance stuff that loved and heard at the
raves my friends did in the early 90’s, they were just putting
vocals over the top of all of it. Everyone was calling it this new,
amazing, groundbreaking music, but to me, that’s what it was:
the same kind of thing I tried to do 8 or 9 years prior and got crap
for trying. Finally bands were doing it and people were digging it.
That gave the hope to try the things I’d had banging around in
my head since ’95 that I never thought anyone would like.
[BB]: You've mentioned health problems as another factor in
the demise of the band, and mentioned your health still isn't tip top.
Would you care to elaborate on your condition?
[DM]: Oh, good grief… I don’t know that I want
to bore anyone with that. Yes, my health still isn’t that great,
and I’m finding out now that I’m basically stuck with the
problems that I have for good. My backpack is a medicine cabinet. I’ve
got a lot of problems with my stomach. My sinuses are thoroughly screwed
up; I get sinus infections all the time and I’ve developed allergies.
Whatever’s flying around in the air here in Portland around springtime
hasn’t helped. But really, I can’t blame it all on the Portland
air, I’ve got myself to blame for 90% of my condition. It sucks
and it doesn’t afford me the ability to do things like go out
to clubs and enjoy the Portland nightlife, but it is what it is. By
all rights, I should have been dead a long time ago over some of the
things I’ve done to my body, so any day I can get out of bed and
out the front door, or make it into my studio and work on music, is
a good day.
[BB]: The feel and texture of
"Unfinished Business" is a far cry from the style and sound
of the original line up. Did making this record on your own influence
that, or is this a direction you had envisioned at an earlier point?
[DM]: Both were factors, absolutely. I could have gone
out and spent a bunch of time trying to make it sound like a live band
record in the tradition of Put Your Hands Down, but doing that wouldn’t
have felt very genuine to me. I have too much respect for my old bandmates,
and that first record, to even begin to attempt something like that.
We had a chemistry, and magic, if you will ;) , that I knew full well
I could never recreate on my own. Chris (Shinkus) was a one-of-a-kind
bass player, Jason (Hubbard) was a one-of-a-kind drummer and programmer,
Andy (Shaw) had a style and tone all his own that simply isn’t
like the way I play guitar. I play all of those instruments, but not
the way those guys played them. All of that aside, my vision of what
the record (should be) was really distilled back when I was doing SimStim,
years before I did the record. I knew that in many ways it was not going
to be anything like what we had done on that first record. I don’t
think I could have ever sold the band on songs like "Don’t
Let Them Forget to Tag Your Symptom" or "21 Robot Man".
Those songs couldn’t have happened any other way than for me to
go off and do them on my own, and I don’t necessarily feel as
if that is a bad thing. Onward and upward, ya know? I can’t rewrite
the same record over and over. I’m just not built that way.
[BB]: Penal Colony used to be signed with Cleopatra
Records. Was there any desire to return to that label? How did "Unfinished
Business" come to be released thru DSBP?
[DM]: Nah…I think I considered talking to them
at some point, but I don’t think they would have taken me back.
Too much bad blood there. I really wanted the record to be part of the
DSBP family all along. That’s where I felt it belonged. Tommy’s
been a good friend and loyal supporter, and he’s the main reason
I started working on the thing to begin with. How did it happen…It
was kind of odd. I was afraid to approach Tommy for fear of rejection,
and he didn’t approach me at first either. I’d been feeding
him tracks as I completed them and he really dug what I was doing, he
even played a bunch of the stuff before it came out. I had been asking
him questions about labels I could go to, whether I should just put
the thing out myself and so on, and then one day in one of our email
threads, he more or less said, "Gee, it’d be cool if I could
put it out". I told him I was kinda hoping he’d say that.
We did it on a virtual handshake, and that was that.
[BB]: What
tools/methods have you been taking advantage of to spread the word of
the re-emergence of Penal Colony?
[DM]: Computers and the internet, that’s pretty
much it. The web makes it possible to strictly be a recording artist,
it’s made it much more acceptable to go that route than it was
10, 15 years ago. Back in the day, you weren’t a true player if
you didn’t have a live show. If you were just a guy in your bedroom
recording and putting out 100 copies of a 7 inch EP, you weren’t
getting much in the way of street cred. About all you could sell it
to was your friends and consign a few copies to the local record store.
The web changed all that. If I want to promote something, I just hit
all the big message boards, usenet groups and mailing lists. If I have
some product to promote I can post some tracks to garageband.com or
myspace.com, make some stuff available on my site. Because of the web,
I’ve been able to hook up print interviews with magazines in Germany,
Russia, and here in the states. The only way I got stuff like that before
was through the label. It’s a beautiful thing, but in some ways,
it’s much more demanding as an artist than it was in the pre-internet
days. You really have to be a multimedia artist, a graphic designer,
you need some programming skills, and you need to have a little more
business sense now. Building a website or making a music video is infinitely
harder than cobbling together a flyer, burning a couple hundred copies
at the local Kinko’s, passing them out and stapling them to a
couple telephone posts. Doing interviews just like this one is, in part,
how I’ve been doing it.
[BB]: Now that you're the only original member left,
wouldn't it have made more sense to go with a name change for the new
record?
[DM]: I had considered that. In fact, I didn’t even commit
on making it a new Penal Colony record until about halfway through recording
it. I had no intention of making something that sounded like Penal Colony,
but once I got 2 or 3 songs in, I began to realize that what I was doing
sounded like Penal Colony. I talked to a few friends about it, and just
said in passing that I was thinking about making it a Penal Colony record,
and everyone I talked to seemed to think it was a good idea. So I rang
up Chris and Jason – both of whom I’d been feeding the new
material to as well – and asked them if it would be okay for me
to use the name, and they were both cool about it and totally supportive.
If either one of them had said no, I wouldn’t have done it. Should
I have not gone that route? I suppose, but I really felt like the Penal
Colony chapter of my life needed some closure. It loomed over me for
8 years like this big, open, pus-oozing sore that I knew wasn’t
going to go away until I made a body of work that could somehow heal
it. That part of my life feels complete now, and it wouldn’t have
if I had done it under another name. Plus, it’s the name that
people remember me by. They don’t know me, but they do know Penal
Colony, and I felt like the new material was worthy of the name. So
who am I to stand in the way of that? I only hope that I can continue
to do new Penal Colony material and continue to carve out the band’s
identity and some small place in history.
[BB]: Do
you have any plans at present to take Penal Colony out on the road?
[DM]: You know, I’ve been asked this more than a few
times, and I’ve been saying that I thought there was a strong
chance that I’d at least get something going and play local...maybe
do a few mini-tours here and there. But I’m not so sure that’s
going to happen anymore. It’s much, much harder for me to make
something like that happen than it was 10 years ago. I have a different
life now, my kids are getting older, I’m getting older, they kinda
like me being around and I like being around. My day gig is pretty demanding
as well. Wrangling some guys together, getting them to drive out to
the sticks to practice in my garage - that’s a stretch. Ideally,
I’d get someone to take on the responsibility of dealing with
all of the live programming aspects so I could just concentrate on writing
and recording and everything else, and just show up for practice and
shows. But who wants to do that? It’s hard to find people willing
to take that kind of thing on.
[BB]: Are there any artists from
other bands who you've wanted to collaborate with?
[DM]: I’ve been wanting to collaborate more with
Jason B. of SMP. We’ve had an idea for something of a concept
album we talked about doing as a side project for some time now, just
never gotten around to working on it due to time constraints and work
on our own things. I’ve been a big SMP fan forever, and I totally
dig the new CD. I would love to do more stuff with Wade of Christ Analogue
too. I really like the new CA, and I just did a remix for him that came
out on their new "Bitcrusher Remixes" CD. In my opinion, Wade
is, hands down, the best producer out there. Everything he touches has
a sheen and production quality that is unrivaled. I’m hoping to
wrangle him for production work on future projects at the very least.
[BB]: You're working on a new DVD for Penal Colony,
which will include a video for "Hypothalamus Now!" What other
golden nuggets can we hope to find on this release, and how soon will
it be available for fans?
[DM]: Ah, the never-ending DVD project.
There’s going to be lots of cool stuff on it. There’s a
video for "Unfinished Business" that really kind of plays
out as a short film and a sequel to the last video Penal Colony did,
the one for "Freemasons of Enochian Magick". I reprise some
of the "characters" in that video and offer some backfill,
turning the whole mess into my own little epic. There’s also an
interview segment, I do a sort of "making of" commentary on
of a couple of the tracks, where I talk about how I wrote them and break
them down into their individual elements. And there may be some new
tracks on it; that remains to be seen. I’m hoping to drop it some
time around the middle of this year.
[BB]: In addition to the DVD
release, what else is in the works for future Penal Colony productions?
[DM]: I’ve got a ton of things on the boiler plate, but
the only things I’ve been able to get any amount of traction on
is a yet-to-be-named all acoustic side project that will be a pretty
drastic departure from Penal Colony. The instrumentation is nothing
but acoustic guitar, upright bass, and some piano, Hammond organ and
a snare with brushes sprayed about here and there. That’s it.
Super minimal. Different in many ways stylistically, but still me being
me. The other thing that might happen this year, believe it or not,
is a skate video DVD that my son’s been working on that I’ll
probably end up helping him complete and roll out as a PCP thing. I
skated vert and surfed for most of my childhood, started skating again
a few years ago. My son picked up skating around the same time, and
him and his friends have gotten real good at the street thing. I’m
hoping that will happen.
[BB]: How
long have you resided in the Portland area? Do you find the pacific
northwest a better creative environment than P.C.'s original southern
California?
[DM]: I’ve been up here since ’98, and yes, it’s
a far, far better environment create in than LA and OC were. Things
are much more laid back here, and the weather keeps you inside quite
a bit more, so you work for lack of something better to do. There are
way too many distractions in California. The culture’s so much
different there. Everything is high pressure, everything is crowded,
there’s traffic everywhere, too many things to do, too many places
to go, and everyone_is_in a band, everyone is very jaded as a result.
So it’s very hard to make opportunities for yourself there. Everything
is disposable and everything is about commerce down there it seems like,
no matter what you’re doing. The music scene here is much homier
and more… organic, I guess, for lack of a better term. Everybody
kind of knows everybody, people are more supportive. You see things
like clubs showing the super bowl on a big screen and having some bands
play after, or clubs doing art gallery shows or showing cool little
indie movies by local directors and having cool bands play as well.
You don’t see that kind of thing happening in LA. Not even in
Silverlake, really.
[BB]: How
has the industrial music scene on the west coast changed over the last
15 years?
[DM]: Oh my gosh… I don’t know if I can
comment on that. I was only really immersed in the scene 10-17 or so
years ago, I’m not really that connected to what is going on now.
Many of the guys that I knew back then are still out there, which is
pretty cool. I think the relationship between Goths and Rivetheads was
much more adversarial then than it is now. People 15 years ago seemed
quite a bit more rigid about what they’d accept as being industrial.
In some ways that has changed dramatically, and in some ways it hasn’t.
People seem to be much more accepting of new and varied forms, but at
its core, you’ve got these two schools of thought now: Those that
believe industrial should never, ever have anything even remotely resembling
a guitar in it, and those that favor the guitar informed industrial
stuff over the "purist" synth stuff. I don’t really
think those camps existed 15 years ago. 15 years ago, I could go to
the Crypt in LA and see H Bomb White Noise with Death Ride 69, and everyone
was into both bands. I’m not sure a bill like that would go over
well now. I kind of like to straddle that fence, and the extremists
don’t seem to care for that too much. I grew up on a steady diet
of punk rock, guitar was the first instrument I learned how to play.
Later in life, I got turned on to Kraftwerk, Eno, the Bowie/Eno stuff,
Throbbing Gristle, and I loved that stuff just as much. I can live in
both worlds, and people seem to be more bothered by that now than they
did when we were starting out. I guess that’s the biggest thing
I’ve seen change, West Coast or otherwise. That, and the advent
of bands from Seattle like Assemblage 23 and Converter. Seattle seems
to have a pretty vital scene now. Back in the day, it was SMP and NoiseBox
and that was about it.
[BB]: Are there any artists around today who you are
still influenced by?
[DM]: Well, yes, but none of them are industrial. The
old OC hardcore stuff is still a big influence on what I do, and some
of those bands are still around – TSOL, Social Distortion, the
Adolescents have done a few reunion shows recently, The D.I.’s
are still around, Agent Orange seems to still be alive and kicking,
or Mike Palm is at least; some of the old LA punk bands that I liked
like X, the Weirdos, the Circle Jerks are all still out there. Old british
punk bands I loved like the Buzzcocks and Stiff Little Fingers are still
around. I’m a rabid Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds fan, but I’m
not sure they influence much of what I do. I can safely say much of
the British and German DnB/Drill and Bass stuff has been a big influence
on me, especially The Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Roni Size, Amon Tobin,
glitch stuff like Autechre. I love the big beat bands like The Prodigy,
Crystal Method and Chemical Brothers… It’s all good. I’m
an old hip-hop fan too, but I really haven’t heard anything since
Ice Cube’s first solo records and the early Death Row stuff that
I’ve thought enough of to go out and get.
[BB]: Any
take on the recent Iraqi elections and Bush's State of the Union Address?
[DM]: That question’s hitting pretty close to home for
me, since my Dad is over there right now. He got a contract gig training
the Iraqi police, he’s in Kuwait as I write this trying to get
back home. That’s been a pretty nerve racking experience for me.
My dad was a cop in some real bad parts of LA, so it’s been like
being a kid all over again: watching the news, wondering if he was anywhere
near some bombing that just happened, wondering if he’s going
to make it home in one piece. As for the Iraqi elections themselves,
I don’t know man. I see people over there that appear to be happy
that they’re finally getting to elect the leader of their country,
and I think that’s great, but I have to wonder how much influence
we’re having over who’s in the running, and who’s
going to win. It also feels like, much like America seems to do with
any 3rd world company they see as some sort of threat, that we’re
imposing our culture and values upon them. The land of obesity and McDonalds
people who believe suicide bombing is an honor? I don’t know.
I don’t think they were a threat, and I think we should be devoting
more of our time flushing terrorists out of Afganistan than we should
be telling Iraq how to run their country. Bush’s State of the
Union was just depressing. "Faith based" this and "pro-life"
that, amendments to prevent same sex marriage... A whole lot of sucking
up to the religious right. Religion has no place in politics or government.
The only thing positive I heard was what he had to say about Social
Security, but really, anyone in his position would have to speak to
that. Social Security scares the crap out of me. I’m 40, and even
as old as I am, it is possible that Social Security could be completely
tapped by the time I’m of retirement age, never mind my kids.
What the hell are we going to live on in our old age?
[BB]: Is the onslaught of Neo-Conservatism
making it more difficult to build an audience for this music, or are
you seeing a different effect?
[DM]: Absolutely not. If anything, I see it as a boon
than a bane for the scene. All Bush and everyone that follows him will
do is continue commit acts of stupidity that will give artists something
to write about, and the fans are only going to benefit from that. It
will make the scene stronger. I think we all still love this country
and we will always want to fight the good fight, we all know what we
like and what we don’t like. The Reagan era didn’t make
the punks go away, and the Bush era sure as hell isn’t going to
send any Rivetheads running for a navy blue suit and a bible.
[BB]: Do you foresee any improvement
in the diversity of radio programming in the next few years?
[DM]: The only improvement I see that could ensure any kind
of diversity in radio is satellite radio. It isn’t going to happen
to corporate radio. Corporate radio’s only going to get more and
more consolidated and conservative, shutting out new music more and
more. The only real hope regular radio has is in College stations and
public stations like KEXP in Seattle. Beyond that, the Great White Hope
is satellite, as far as I can tell. Satellite radio could make it possible
for average Joes like you or I to have a radio show, and that can only
be a good thing.
[BB]: Anything (political, musical, otherwise) you'd like to pimp or
shout about before we conclude?
[DM]: Big shout outs to my wife and kids, Laura, Grey, and
Bevin, my homies back in the IE – Chris, Justin and Roger. Get
Christ Analogues "The Bitcrusher Remixes", featuring yours
truly, in stores now. And everyone should get out there and offer some
support, financial or otherwise, to your local child abuse or domestic
violence outreach organization - and help for the homeless organizations.
The strength and durability of a country begins in the home, so we absolutely
have to take care of our victims of a bad home life, if we expect to
be able to tackle the bigger problems we face.
[BB]: Thank you for your time and the opportunity!
We look forward to your future work.
[DM]: Thanks for having me! I really like your site! Keep on
keeping on.
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