> so, lander, what is animals w/in animals?
the obvious answer would be that animals within animals is a band, focusing on underground styles of electronic music. but fundamentally awia is an experiment in artist networking. there is an ever-growing movement of basement artists, working in relative anonymity, creating quality music that will never be heard by 99% of the population. animals within animals is about bringing those artists together, getting people to collaborate who otherwise wouldn't have been able or inclined to do so, because of an inability to get signed, artistic differences, or sheer geographical distance. a term i use is "side projects within side projects"; we're a loose collection of artists coming together, be it for one album, a single song, or the whole career of the band.
what i'd like to see come out of awia is a bunch of smaller, more specialized side projects. stAllio! & murkbox have already been discussing an "avant garde hip-hop" project; a far cry from what animals within animals is doing, but something i'd like to hear nonetheless. this is only the start of what you could call "team awia", & as the band grows & recruits more members i hope to see many more spinoff projects.
> and an obvious follow-up: what has your role been?
my role has been somewhat invisible, as a visionary & organizer. i don't like to travel much, & as such have left much of the actual performing & recording to other members, especially stAl!y. i act to provide a sense of direction (albeit a vague one) & supply ideas for styles & song construction. while i do physically perform on 4 or 5 of the songs off "yard ape", our debut album, most of my work is behind the scenes: working in post-production, creating & updating the website, & so forth.
now that the album is completed, i also hope to work more on promotion, although that might be difficult, considering my busy schedule & the extreme difficulty of reaching an audience in this underground niche. although the primary focus of the band is networking artists, bringing the people together only serves a limited good if there's nobody out there listening.
> so what exactly does it mean, "animals w/in animals"?
the name actually came from a sociology class stAllio! took back in college. it was presented as one of the "warning signs in children's drawings that the child has been sexually abused". others were "people without heads" & "people with missing limbs". rather a disturbing image, a child's drawing with random headless people & animals inside other animals. this was a lecture class, by the way, with no real textbook or source citation for the information presented by the professor (or it could be that stAllio! is notoriously bad about taking notes. either way, we have since tried to look up this data & have been unable to find it).
but we've found that animals within animals also functions well as a metaphor for the band in general (minus the child abuse connotations). it supplies us with a wealth of potential subject matter, virtually anything relating to the animal kingdom, particularly parasites & some other themes we began to explore in the debut album. too many electronic artists use the same old now-worn-out themes of cyborgs & the dehumanization of society. we can use these themes too (humans are only animals in the end) but we don't have to rely on them. there are also layers of symbolism in the album title "yard ape" & the cover artwork.
> exactly who is this stallio! and what is his relationship to > the whole project?
stAl!y is the co-founder of the group, although our roles are vastly different. he has a much more hands-on approach & is more personally involved with writing & recording the music. i tend to rule from afar, & work more as a producer than a performer. he's like my field agent; i can reach out to someone, but without him going out & actually jamming with these artists, they wouldn't truly be in the group. it's not as clear-cut as that, but you should get the picture.
stAl!y seems pretty happy in these roles so far, but i'm sure they'll evolve as the band grows. he's been releasing solo material for a while; he got into music "backward", you might say. many people start out joining bands & only then go solo. he's been recording solo stuff for years & is eager to finally collaborate with others, so the appeal for him is obvious.
> i know you've referred to awia's work as "innovative". can > you elaborate on this a little?
well i would hope that being innovative would be any artist's goal, but unfortunately sometimes that's not the case. yes, i'd like to think that my work is innovative, perhaps the organizational style of the band more than the music on the cd itself. the concept of a band of loosely collected artists, virtually anyone who pleases to be honest, who may never even meet face to face.. i have to say it strikes me as fresh. there have been similarly-put-together groups before (pigface comes to mind, an obvious inspiration), but even they were all signed musicians, most in already-established big name bands. we are really a bunch of nobodies, and thus more underground.
not that the music isn't creative. naturally i can spot all our influences (negativland had a clear influence on the stAl!io vs dr butcher md sessions), so i'm probably more critical than most. but some of the songs stAl!io & i did, wtf & funtime, were programmed largely to write themselves, by muting & unmuting repeating loops at random times. there's interesting noisy stuff, amusing & informative tape manipulations for those who don't like noisyness as much, great fun to be had with "filthy humans", & the total 180 of "last song" at the end. a few members are even working on a track titled "man vs machine (the beat box showdown)" for the upcoming bad taste/trash tapes split compilation.
> with as much collaboration as you're doing, it seems like > you might have a fair share of disagreement/strife. is this > totally off the mark? and if not, how do you deal with the > problem?
yes & no. there was a conflict early on with one of the original members, before the person in question had even begun work on any of the music. but that was more a personal betrayal than any kind of artistic difference. he turned into an asshole who'd rather betray his friends than live up to any kind of responsibility. i won't degrade this interview by listing any names because everyone even remotely involved in the situation would already be painfully aware, and because any pertinent info can be determined by visiting stAl!io's personal site, anyway. that wasn't much of a loss for the group, anyway; he would've been the least musically talented member of the band had he remained.
as for musical differences, the band has been set up hopefully to compensate for that. i state in the "philosophy" section of the web site that awia is "anti-consistency". a natural part of any group so varied in background in interest will be a difference of artistic vision. this is why awia has no set sound or direction. i offer guidance, of course, but any specific collaboration is guided largely by the individuals involved. each subset is allowed to explore its own direction, which will inherently be different from that of any other combination. it's like a balloon; everything is kept in relative balance by the pressure coming from every direction.
> as a follow-up, doesn't the lack of consistency make for a > less coherent production?
yes, it does, but who's to say coherence is a virtue? it's a big world out there, changing rapidly, & the ability to fully understand any issue is an illusion. there's always another layer, another level, yet to be uncovered & beyond our current comprehension. all education is built on lies, really. one year they're teaching you about long division & remainders, then they hit you with the "truth" that numbers aren't always whole. the next thing you know they're telling you about irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, limits, integration... santa claus doesn't exist, & neither do imaginary numbers, but suddenly we're supposed to stop believing in st nick & start believing in negative one under the radical.
nothing is black & white. & regardless of whether the universe is chaos with the semblance of order or patterns that appear to be random, we are not at a point where we can discern one from the other. awia is a funhouse mirror, exaggerating these conflicts. just when you think you know what an awia recording is about, something else pops up which totally defies your expectations. especially our tape cut-up work: the most information you can ever get on a subject is fragmentary, only a small thumbnail that pretends to be the whole picture. by taking the message out of context, & then cutting it up & pasting it together differently, we bring to light just how confusing the message really is. plus it's fun to hear someone confess "i eat tapeworms" or "i could be a dead starfish".
> so, is your deconstructivist world-view really part of the > message, ie the message is that there's no message, or is > there simply no message? on the one hand you seem to have > a pretty established point of view on this, but on the > other getting to hear someone say "i eat tapeworms" is a > pretty convincing end in itself... i expect you'd agree.
well, factually to be be truly & literally anti-consistent, we must have a message sometimes but not others. i don't even want to go into all the ramifications of that. at the least, the message might be totally different by the time we do the next album. i think it says on the web page somewhere that animals within animals is constantly in flux. we're assimilating new members all the time, discovering new styles of music & new directions to go. so making any form of permanent statement regarding the band is pointless (not that i didn't do it a few times in this very paragraph).
definitely a lot of it is fun, to record & to listen to. "filthy humans" really couldn't be said to have any kind of message; it's mostly just an excuse to swear, & will surely keep the cd out of walmart forever. the cut-ups are fun, & could be construed to have a message. the lyrics to "fish kill soup" were in a newspaper article about a real fish kill that happened in the white river not too far from here, & if any song on yard ape has a message, that one does.