by Bart de Paepe

Probably the late 90's. (I'm 21)

Can't tell!

Life pretty much. More so sights and sounds than experiences, though those do have a small role.

Surprisingly I don't watch that many horror movies, or movies in general. The music just comes from an image or thought I have in my head, or maybe I'm just in a bitchy mood, hehe.

Noise is a limitless form of music. Except those dudes that superimpose limits on it. Fuck em.

I was always into noisier grind stuff, but one fateful day 4-5 years ago my friend sent me a Masonna album over the internet and it really peaked my interest. Living in Michigan, there was a wealth of weird music out there that I hadn't heard before to explore. Went to Encore Records in Ann Arbor and picked up some early Wolf Eyes and some other various records and it kinda went from there.

I have a lot of shit laying around, but lately I've been sticking to some bent keyboards, guitar/bass w/ bows, some tape loops, some mixer feedback loops, and a couple delay pedals. I have too much equipment, so I try and mix and match things to see what works best with what and keep it as minimal as I can, especially live.

Sometimes very dreamy and sleeping sounding.. mellow.. and others kind of frantic and harsh that will result in equipment being thrown at people without me realizing it. The mellow sets are usually longer and the harsher sets are usually very short... I always try and keep my sets under 10 minutes.

Greh and I both live in the same general area, so I met him at some shows and we gradually started talking more. We did a live collab recently. I don't really know the fate of it. It may or may not be released. Think that's in Greh's ballpark right now, because I'm cool with whatever.

Yeah, I've done a lot of collabs with people. I always enjoy working with other artists, because I love constantly mixing things up. Some styles work together, some don't, but it's all fun and interesting.

Haha. Hentai Cum Dungeon is my buddy Mike's digital hardcore/gabber/noise/whatever band. The Painted Lady is this shitty bar in Hamtramck, which is a small sub city of Detroit. I guess it's not really that bad if you're just going to get tanked, but it blows for playing gigs.

Athenian Mercury: that was my first noise band. It was my buddy Chris and I swapping recordings back and forth and mixing them together into full tracks. Kind of like a mail thing, but over the internet. For the most part it was pretty harsh, but it also had a lot more to it. Lots of blended styles and sounds, just hard to pick out sometimes. We eventually met up and played a show and recorded in person, but since then, we've been kind of dormant. I think things are supposed to start up again soon.

Solder Teenage Daughter: that was an Athenian Mercury/Scissor Shock collab album. It was kind of a one off, but who knows, it might happen again.

Oghsoi: one of my favorite projects actually. I teamed up with my mc friend Tom and banged out a noisey as fuck hip hop e.p. He did the beat, and I did the music around it, then he rapped on top of it. We all shared the mixing duties. I'm really hoping we do another one, because I thought it sounded like absolutely nothing out there.

My Game of Loving: that project was pretty interesting, the first e.p. It's a project with my
buddy Dan. He was a computer music type dude, so I ran all my gear line in to the pc and he fucked with it in real time in Reaktor and Ableton. Turned out really cool. We're actually working on a full length right now. This one doesn't involve much computer fuckery. He's gotten into creating his own electronic gadgets and shit lately, so we basically went nuts with those and whatever else we could find laying around my place. I have one 20 minute track mixed down and I think he's going to be mixing his own version and also doing a weird remix. Should be really rad. Probably coming out in the next month or two.

Noise is actually a very small fraction of what I listen to. I find a lot of it boring and predictable, so I'm pretty selective of what I listen to. It has to be unique and original sounding, or I'll probably just pass on it. The wall of distortion is totally played out. I listen to so many different styles of music, I find it more fun to see how I can make them fit into the noise scheme of things. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. it's just more interesting to me.

My Bloody Valentine is one of my favorite all time bands! Actually some of my favourite music ever came out of that whole late 80's early 90's British shoegaze scene. MBV was so beautiful sounding, but abrasive at the same time in some songs. Like an extremely fuzzy dream. As for Sonic Youth, I never really got into them too much. Respect what they've done blah blah, but just never really got into their music.

Haha... yeah, actually. I've had people come up to my girlfriend at shows and ask, "hey, what time are you going on?" or "hey, your new cd was really awesome." and she'll just kind of stand their with a funny smirk on her face and I won't say anything.. then I'll go on and play later and people will have these 'wtf' type looks on their faces... it's really fun to fuck with people sometimes.