The artifact is what comes first.

Liberation: With your music… I can’t just put it on. I find myself really listening to it, almost as if I am reading a book. It stands out from the other artists in your genre because it is a lot more sophisticated than something like Nine Inch Nails.

JGT: It’s not background music. (laughs) Its intensity is one of its hallmarks but I don’t consider myself to be in a genre with someone like Nine Inch Nails. It depends on what some people want to do. I think some people have it really mapped out. I never thought about how to make money doing this. I wouldn’t be doing this to make money, there would be other things one could do. A lot of people have always said that I get to a certain point in what I am doing and then I shift sideways or shoot myself in the foot. It is not conscious thing, I just get bored and I like to contradict myself.

Liberation: What was it like putting together Love? You sound a lot more theatrical this time out.

JGT: Yeah, to a certain extent, I didn’t go in with those words in my vision. I really reflected on what I had done before, where I was in my life. I wanted to do something that wasn’t as sprawling stylistically, something that wasn’t so all over the map.

I thought about certain areas I wanted to expand upon. That was informed by what I had been doing in the interim from the previous Foetus albums, working on a project called Manorexia which is more spacious and instrumental. I put together an 18 piece ensemble and I was working more with arrangements and live instruments. The whole idea of taking the most symphonic elements of what I did and expanding on that and also the cinematic elements of what I did and using that too. When I started off I wanted to expand on the spacial qualities that I started exploring with Manorexia and that was working but it didn’t have the intensity that I wanted. I realized that after reflecting on what I had done.

A lot of times when I am working on material it’s not like, ‘OK, I’m starting an album,’ and I do it from start to finish in one stretch, it’s over a period of time, there were some albums that were over a period of several years. Love had a higher mortality rate of songs dropping of it because the more I work the more specific I get about the vision and defining a direction and a vocabulary of what I want to do. I think that is why I am not as prolific as I used to be.

The first couple of years that I was putting out records there was a huge amount of stuff that was just vomited out. Every idea I ever had was spewing out in all of these different directions. I am a lot more focused now. I have a lot more baggage and I think that as you get older you lose some of your naivety or maybe some of your stupidity but I like to keep a handle on as much stupidity as possible.

Liberation: Are you less self conscious now so you can allow yourself to take your time to…

JGT: No, now I am more self conscious. I feel like I am under more scrutiny. Manorexia opened up a new creative path for me and it felt like the way I used to create. I was doing something specifically that I knew from the outset that I was going to release though my web site, something that didn’t have a history. It was a clean slate and that was very liberating. Now that has an identity and has opened a lot of doors, I am feeling a little stifled by that too even though I want to do a third album. I have written a lot of material towards it. Now the creative burst has started to get creaky… I think I need to do something else. I have to act as an artistic therapist to myself.

Liberation: Working under these different personas, does it allow the other ones to come out stronger or push you into different directions with certain ideas?

JGT: Usually I am writing within a very broad space and I’m not always thinking this is going to be a song for this project or that project. It is coming out and it is evolving and then as it starts to take shape its identity starts to come. It depends on the song. I’ll be in a space, like a melodic space or a mood space. I mean, I am not in the mood space writing big, blistering, hard rock songs at this point in my life. I’ve done a few of those and I might again but today I’m not doing that, I’m writing string quartets.

Liberation: How did the French music find its way in?

JGT: I started writing that piece (mon agonie douce) and it was going to be an instrumental and then I thought it would really good with vocals but I think they should be in French. I’ve been listening to more and more French music and spending more time in France. I like working with a lot of different languages, both graphically and with lyrics. I’ve done a song in Spanish, I’ve used a lot of German titles and I like to mix a lot of different languages together graphically because I think there is an exotic element to it, especially Arabic and Japanese. They are very beautiful scripts and that has a mystery to me because they’re not my first language. Plus I can say things on that song in French that I could never say in English.

Liberation: Certain languages lend themselves well to certain mediums.

JGT: The rhythm and the phonetics of the French language really lend itself to certain ways of saying things. If I had sang that song in German instead it just wouldn’t work. (laughs)

Liberation: Are you touring for this album?

JGT: No, I am only doing isolated live shows. I am doing this 18 piece band thing now that I have been doing it for a couple of years. When the last Steroid Maximus album came out I approached UCLA about commissioning a set of charts so I could perform it with live instruments. I sat down with Steven Bernstein and we listened to it and we figured out how many instruments we would need and what kind of instruments to realize this and that’s how things started to take shape. We performed Steroid Maximus in Los Angeles for the first time, we did it in Europe a few more times and then I got an offer from this festival in Austria. What I really wanted to do was have the same line up except sing with it as well because with Steroid Maximus I was conducting. So I said to them if you’d like I’ll do two sets but you have to commission this second set of charts for 18 musicians and 10 pieces of music. They did and we premiered it in April and did two sets, the first I conducted, the second Steve Bernstein conducted and I sang.

It’s not something I have even thought about doing in New York but there are a few places in Europe that I would like to do it. I can’t imagine touring with an 18 piece band, I’m not Brian Setzer.

Liberation: Do you have any formal music training?

JGT: Not particularly. I have learned a couple of instruments when I was a kid and then I got stuck with reading music. It didn’t stick with me so I dropped my formal musical training and picked it up later.

Liberation: What drew you towards music as opposed to painting or sculpting?

JGT: I have always been obsessed with music and art from a very early age but I steered a bit more in the way of visual arts. I went to art school for a couple of years that was what made me decide this is not what I really want to do. I knew I wanted to do something with music but I didn’t know what. I didn’t want to be on this side of the world. I was 18 and I packed up and left Australia. When I got to London I bought a bass guitar and a couple of synthesizers and that’s how it started to evolve.

Liberation: What brought you from London to New York?

JGT: Doing a show with Lydia [Lunch], Nick Cave and Marc Almond called The Immaculate Consumptive. We did two shows here at Danceteria and one show at the 9.30 Club in D.C. and that was the first time I performed live with Foetus. I just loved New York and stayed on. I had been living in London and…back to that whole shooting yourself in the foot phenomenon…it was right when I was starting to get known in London, right before the album Hole came out. That’s when I turned my back on that and stuck it out here.

Liberation: What was it like collaborating with Lydia? Both of your work is so emotionally intense that I could see how you would be incredibly attracted to each other but then also be like two atomic bombs exploding next to one another.

JGT: (laughs) No, it’s not like that at all. She’s very open to stuff and we know each others parameters and strengths. I’d come up with an idea or we’d talk about things and it was very loose, much looser than the way I work on my own stuff. There were situations where I’d bring her in and I’d say, OK, you need to do this and then I’d do the rest. Or she’d have an idea of something we could do live and we’d work out ways of doing it. It was really quite easy.

Liberation: How is your work received in Europe as opposed to the United States? Our mainstream culture is so terrible, they don’t know how to process you.

JGT: I am so not part of the mainstream meilleur and I haven’t been in so long. I have pockets of people that are interested in what I do, I don’t know who they are, what they look like, what their names are…

Liberation: Yeah, but you seem to speak to the people you need to.

JGT: I would like a lot more people to know about my work. It’s frustrating that the avenues are so close and people say the Internet is the great democratic force but it’s not really. It’s the same thing. You are still fighting for space because everyone is writing about The White Stripes or Beck.

Liberation: But do you think now that we have the Internet it is easier for people to stumble upon your work whereas 10, 15 years ago they would have to do so by word of mouth or independent magazines?

JGT: No, I don’t think it is easier because there is so much more stuff. Certainly in the last 10 years the technology has really democratized the recording studio so there is more of a volume of things out there. The people in charge of the filtering process are the people being courted by the publicists so if you’ve got 600 albums coming out a month…it wasn’t like that when I started and I have been doing this for 20 years. It’s a very new-centric media, there’s not a lot of loyalty. I can be doing the most astounding, interesting stuff I’ve done in my entire life but because I am doing it, it’s not newsworthy. But if someone else was doing it you wouldn’t be able to get away from it.

Liberation: I definitely think there is far too much attention being paid to new artists, especially people like Juliette Lewis or The Strokes who are doing the same routine that someone else has already done 20 years ago. Their roadmap has already been provided for them.

JGT: Juliette Lewis, I mean give me a break! It’s sort of embarrassing to be in the same business…(laughs). I like some of her contributions to The Prodigy album but…it’s like Baby Shambles, it’s so dire but he’s so newsworthy. But who cares about that fucking music, it’s lame! People also take it very seriously and give him a lot of slack. Maybe it has always been like that but there was more music around. I think a lot of the culture has been diluted. We’re talking about the culture that being covered by mainstream press and there are a lot of people doing interesting stuff out there and it’s just not on their radar.

Liberation: Do you think it’s harder, say there is an 18 year-old in Australia who wants to come to New York to make music, do you think it’s harder now then it was when you first came over?

JGT: It’s very different. The technology is such that anyone can make a world-class recording on no budget. Anyone can have a quality object to handout, it’s very easy to do. There are a whole lot of other infrastructures that you can lock into. It’s a very different time, I mean music is so omnipresent now, it’s also very commodified. It used to be more of a lifestyle choice now it’s just an accessory.

Liberation: What advice do you have for new musicians getting started or people who want to be more experimental with their work?

JGT: Stop right now! Get a day job! (laughs)

Liberation: Why do you say that?

JGT: I don’t have advice for those people, I don’t have advice for anyone. I only do what I do. Surprise me! Thrill me! That’s my advice.

On The Web | www.foetus.org