Definitely be sure to check out Wicked Wednesdays if you are in the area. Scoundrel is the house band for the night and we are always dropping our newest bass heavy bootygrime explorations. As well, there will be a different selector each week to keep your dark and dirty nice and phresh and philthy. Enjoy the grimey hex and don’t forget to hug the DJ! Your love is the best and Johan loves you right back.

So what’s the new record about? With a title like vltrahex, its obvious that this term accurately describes my mood when it comes to putting out bizarre defiant harsh vocal electronica in the year preceding 2012, and also makes for a fitting battle cry in this era of the ferocious plutocratic vampire squid. I seem to have a thing for surreal un-pop songs, so there’s a healthy dose of that, along with my odd trademark cross-pollination of synthetic ghosts, unholy bass wobbles, pixelated kick drums and heaps of overblown confidence. That said, these sonic blast waves are more than capable of ejecting corporate pop stars from their private jets, making their deflated botox lips flap helplessly as they plummet to nothingness.

For the tracks that carry the greatest delusions of grandeur, I have also created remix kits:

Functional Vanity [remix pack / original track] (135 BPM)

Occult Celebrity [remix pack / original track] (127 BPM)

With remixes already secured by artists like [tlr], palebit, and CHEEZFACE, this album is shaping up to be quite a powerhouse of underground mutant electronic weirdness. Send me your remix ASAP and it just might, nay, more likely will be on the new album!

In anticipation of the release date, I have made it possible to conveniently pre-order the album digitally, whereupon you will get three spectacular bLvrgTr0n tracks for download immediately, and later be notified via e-mail when the album is fully available to download on April 20th. The actual album artwork is still in the process of being designed, and you should expect something much better coming soon to replace it!

Also worth mentioning, you may want to take in an earful of this stuff…

Speaking of unyielding torrents of rage, I am in the final stages of mixing for Murder The World, the second album by my machine-metal band HoodooEngine, which will be released around the same time as bLvrgTr0n. In case you weren’t aware, I do all the words and vocals for this group, so it’s definitely relevant to check out if you want to follow my creative output besides what I do on my own. At least we were recently featured on the podcast/radio show Solipsistic Nation with the likes of ohGr and Tim Skold, so shouldn’t that be enough to get you all excited about buying some of this music like you are probably doing with all of your favorite clearchannel bands?

Yeah, yeah… I know how it is, you crazy bitches. Have a nice one.

Recently went around to put up flyers for Night of the Living P.A. which is happening on Saturday June 18th at The Garage. While taking a break to get some pizza at Asheville Brewing Company I tweeted a photo of the flyer superimposed over some fabulous wrestler photos that are part of the decorum at that restaurant…

Wrestling and Industrial go together like Wine and Cheese.

Really excited about being a part of this event alongside Mecanikill?, Headstone Hollow, Shadowbunny and others. Huge props to Erica Drunk-Gypsy for putting together such a rare treat-of-a-show to this region and also to Shadowbunny for designing such a prettyful flyer!

After that, all you west coast peeps and alienz get ready for the dawn ov Extreme Futurist Fest 2011 in Los Angeles, CA on the weekend of December 16-17th. This festival invented by the mad scientist Rachel Haywire will be an amazing consortium of transhumanist speakers, performers, film, and art that is sure to shatter a hole in the conceptual fabric of human reality. More details on this radical festival to come…

NVR-NDR – Extreme Hyper Impact

OK, so here’s something new and interesting. A hybrid live/remix album from the NVR-NDR project by west coast cohort and magicore magistrate [tlr] (formerly of Romak and the Space Pirates) that will make your brain explode with much excitement! Loaded with imagery of ninja demon space-battle in pizza skirts and ultra-mecha optimum conciousness, this pre-release to the full album by the NVR-NDR project on the seminal RoboRobotica netlabel is presented in a stunning live format with some backing vocals and final audio mastering done by myself!

These guys are EXTREME! You’ve got to hear this. PRWAWRP!!!

LISTEN/DOWNLOAD

Can you please tell us who Hoodoo Engine are?

Marz233

Marz233: Murder The World was a big “fuck you” to all the awful corporate entities that we were working for at the time. A way to blow off steam while attempting to merge our past and present influences into one giant ironic cluster fuck. HoodooEngine was at first a separate project consisting of a lot of material I was writing that was composed of synthetic elements… Influenced mainly by electro-rooted hybrids of various styles. A large amount of the material just naturally meshed together, I think, and wound up becoming one project.

Frater Gazebo (JC)

James Curcio: In the process we brought in Johan Ess, who helped bring a conceptual focus through vocals and lyrics. There were some other collaborators on EgoWhore, though the more extensive collaboration has been saved for the follow-up, which we’re now calling Murder The World. See how that worked? It’s like the two projects had sex when we weren’t looking, and got fused together.

Those additional collaborators were Jeff Hartman and Scott Landes laying down additional guitar material, again, especially for Murder The World. I have collaborated on and off with Scott Landes for years. He plays most frequently these days with Mankind is Obsolete and Collide. We also got additional percussion from Iron Will.

So far this has primarily been a studio project. Marz233 is the engineer. I can almost imagine him in an old style locomotive engineer’s outfit while working on the tracks, though I’ve yet to actually get him one. Maybe for his birthday.

Johan Ess

Johan Ess: …and if Sean won’t wear the train conductor’s outfit, I definitely will!

Where does the name come from?

JC: It was kind of slang, meaning haunted or ghost train. EgoWhore has a lot of references on it to that. The first two tracks are dedicated to it, “Psychoactive Paranormal Locomotive Drive!” And the cover art, of course.

M233: A hoodoo engine was a term coined around the turn of the century to describe a steam engine that was cursed. So any engine that broke down quite often or took the lives of many railroad workers would be nicknamed a Hoodoo. Basically, a train built to fail. It was also as James said attributed to ghost train sightings.

JE: I always thought it was a somewhat veiled metaphor for sex magick, of which we are all fans of in some capacity or another. This is expanded upon to an absurd degree in the track “Hoodoo Luv”, something of a farcical mating call to real and imagined groupies. Lots of fun with trite occult rock star imagery.

JC: So far I haven’t gotten laid once because of that damn song, either.

I understood you did everything in a totally DIY-way. Please explain.

JC: For a while I was a part of a group of musicians and producers that banded together in New york, and we had a pretty large co-owned studio. Marz233 had his own shared studio down here. Over time those spaces became financially unfeasible but the upside is that gear has also gotten considerably more portable. I have v-drums, a modeling amp and of course tons of modeling VST effects, Marz has controllers and his laptop and whatnot. Aside from Will’s hand drums and Johan’s vocal chords everything is “virtual.” There’s really no need for a 13,000 square foot studio for a project like this. Though it is sure fun to have space like that to run around and be loud in at 3 in the morning. Maybe eventually we can make virtual musicians that live on virtual coffee. Less overhead.

Iron Will

JE: Since we do both the music and production all ourselves, you’re hearing the true character of our band. Unfiltered for the most part, except for audio filters of course.

M233: Also, we don’t have much of a choice but to DIY. Who else is going to do it?

I guess it must make you laugh with bands who lock themselves up in the most expensive studios…

JC: We’d probably rather use that budget for recreation.

M233: Hey, if I had the cash to do it I would pay for some of those expensive studios just to acquire access to a large array of tube-driven outboard gear, and it would be nice for once to mix and record in a space that is specifically designed for it. A new computer is an unfortunate necessity.

Any other plans for the band?

JC practicing, with foreground inspiration.

JC: We definitely want to wrap up Murder The World. EgoWhore was a bit of an homage to a number of acts, though it was also a means of exploring the possibilities of our own sound with this arrangement of people. But Murder The World is more  progressive, and by that I mean that we’re moving forward a little bit from the sound of the first album. Not that we’re fighting giant silver dragons in 9/8 time. Though I guess that’d be cool, too.

Beyond that, I’d like to hear yet more club play and maybe something can coax us into putting this thing into production for live performance. We’re all perfectionists though, so I kind of have an attitude like, if you’re going to do it do it right. There are a lot of demands there and precious few rewards, which is why we’re not all crammed in a van together at this very moment. But we’ll see.

M233: I’ll keep writing. I’m not sure what else I would do. So it all depends on what I’m writing, and if the rest of the crew are down with mixing their secreted musical juices into it, then yes we will endure.

I guess you agree you play Industrial Metal which links you to KMFDM, Combichrist or Die Krupps or so on. Were those bands an example to you?

Marz233, thinking about “ending it all.”

JC: I think it would be different for each of us who we list, and it might even be different on different days. Some of them may be surprising too, like Marz233 was trying to bring some elements of crunk and hardcore to what we’re doing. But yeah, KMFDM, Ministry and Chemlab were all bands we listened to in high school or whatever and like I said there was a definite “homage” element to EgoWhore. But I can’t say there was a conscious decision to sound like anything. At least not on my part.

JE: Along with the industrial and metal mainstays in my musical appetite, I draw a lot of inspiration from the digi-grind scene with vocals, although my voice is probably a lot more intelligible than what you typically hear in that scene. Being greatly under the influence of fine electronic music, this fuels the synth parts I contribute. The rest of my inspiration is mostly drawn from the bleak conditions of existence, along with unhealthy mental processes caused by imbibing too much Neurocrunk #9.

JC: I’ve also not been sober since 1995. That’s been a huge inspiration.

JC and Scott Landes recording an earlier project. (2003)

Your album is called “Egowhore”, who’s an egowhore then?

JC: Someone who’s sense of self worth is a fabricated hall of mirrors, like the Wizard of Oz. It also just seemed like a funny thing to title a debut.

JE: Anyone willing to compromise on their principles for a chance at recognition. Pretty much the premise of the entire entertainment industry these days.

How are the reactions in your country so far?

JC: People seem to be enjoying it. You know, you get that occasional reaction where someone heard your music and you can’t for the life of you figure out the route it took to get to their ears. I enjoy it when that happens. But I’m probably better known personally for my writing – that gets me more lunatic calls at 3 in the morning. I really need to change my number.

M233: I’m not sure I try not to leave my cave. Nah, seriously we’ve had some mixed reviews, but overall the feedback has been surprisingly positive.

JE: I think its hilarious when people think we’re completely serious, because one of the main points of our first record was to have fun with stereotypes in this genre.

I know it must be far too early, but is there talk about doing something on European ground?

JC: That depends entirely on reaction. If this was 1997, and we still believed in the Myth of the Industry, we’d probably be pedaling our asses all over town to line that up. Now it’s a situation where you need to build the vehicle from scratch and then if you’re lucky, someone buys the gas for you. Figuratively speaking. What would be even better, to my mind, is to hear that it’s getting more play abroad in clubs and whatnot. I just want the music to find the people that enjoy it.

M233: I would love to visit Europe, Great Britain and the Netherlands especially, but that may not be for a while unfortunately.

I guess I can tell your music is one of extremes, do you see yourself as “extreme guys”?

Extreme, like Neil Patrick Harris.

JC: I don’t know about the other guys, but I’m extreme like Neil Patrick Harris.

M233: I’m not happy until the walls are bleeding shit and colors!

JE: There are aspects of myself which could be considered extreme depending on who you ask. I am not willing to do things like eat pebbles off the ground and randomly light my hair on fire, but would certainly not be against having my entire body saran-wrapped, blasting our record from a monster truck in midday traffic while doing interpretive dancing on the roof.

JC: He really does that stuff. Don’t test him.

Do you believe in the holy trinity that sex, drugs and rock is or is there more…

JC: There’s more to life, but it’s certainly a good foundation.

These questions I always ask: what’s your fave record of all time and please tell me why!

JC: I honestly don’t know. I’m not being glib. It just really depends on my mood. But I will say that the most recent thing I listened to was Mr Bungle, and they remain one of the better acts I’ve seen live.

JC on V-Drums

JE: Musick to Play in the Dark by Coil is probably my all time favorite music. If you haven’t heard it, just listen (in the dark obviously) and you’ll see why. Much of their work instantly creates a sense of ritual space, which I enjoy immensely. “Wise words from the departing… eat your greens, especially Broccoli.” Rest in peace, Jhon and Sleazy.

M233: Yeah, that’s a tough one. I guess it depends on when you catch me. I can say that my major influences for HoodooEngine would have to be Agnostic Front, Butthole Surfers, MDFMK, Bone Crusher and Azax Syndrome.

With who wouldn’t you mind to be alone with in an elevator for 8 hours and what would you do then?

JC: The real answer to this question involves girls you’ve never met. But I do think it’d be pretty edifying and entertaining to be stuck in an elevator for eight hours with James Maynard Keenan. I imagine he’d wonder who the fuck we were and why he was stuck in the elevator with us, Marz’s eclectus parrot would make awful noises, and we could all stare awkwardly into each other’s eyes.

JE: We could even take turns singing our songs in accapella, parrot included. It would be a very satisfying experience for everyone.

M233: I don’t think anyone wants to be stuck in an elevator with Beaker, he’s a fucking menace!

Pick up EgoWhore on digital or CD format.

If any of you have been watching my social media posts, you probably already know what has been going on with my creative output lately. For those who haven’t, proud to announce that I have joined an insane band called HoodooEngine!

Originally going under the name Murder The World, the other members are James Curcio (aka @agent139), Marz233, and Iron Will (along with special guests like Scott Landes of MKIO). The material sent my way over the past couple years had really struck me as a profound musical statement and their podcasts were something not to be missed!

Some odd kind of paradigm shift happened to the project when I met up with these individuals at their home base in Philly over the summer. Since then, I remember going through lots of screaming, audio alchemy work, and interaction with unusual supernatural entities. A couple months later and our first release EGOWHORE is now available for the digital ears of the internets and beyond.

To buy EGOWHORE digitally or on CD, check out our online store.

My contributions include writing lyrics, performing vocals, the more wacky synth parts, and mastering for the first album. The kind of themes you will find here are morbid humour, dark sci-fi imagery, the world ending, and kinky sex.

We are currently working on a follow up full length for release in 2011. Oddly enough, as it was the former name of our band, the album is tentatively titled Murder The World. So far, it sounds like a tweaked out psychedelic flight across the Abyss.

Couple things I would also like to throw in here. As we have just given birth to this project, there is a dire need for EGOWHORE album reviews, interviews, podcasts, music videos, print publications, and public appearances. If anyone out there would like to get involved, help out, or is able to do such for us, in return we will gladly perform at your wedding!

For more information, check out hoodooengine.com and please follow @HoodooEngine!

Pre-Sale Tickets are $5 per day and $15 per weekend pass. Door prices will be $7 with no weekend pass
available during the event. Order yours today! http://www.nophest.com/