Splendid: I was reading this quote on your web board -- it's supposed to be from Jonathan Kane, this black mathematician who may or may not exist. It goes like this: "What reason overlooks is the insatiable drive toward problem creating, making simple solutions insolubly difficult, elaborating every aspect of life beyond function, beyond beauty, beyond usefulness, and finally beyond sustainability." I was thinking that that probably had a certain amount of relevance to the music you make.

Nils Frykdahl: It certainly has a lot to do with how our music ends up sounding like it does. In one sense, yeah, we tend to always be pushing ourselves toward elaboration. That's our natural tendency, anyway, as musicians.

Splendid: If you talk to some musicians, they work like Picasso -- they'll make something that's sort of complicated and then they try to pare it down and make it simple. It sounds like you're going in the other direction...

Nils Frykdahl: Well, actually, that quote, one of the reasons that I was sort of drawn to it and we may have used it -- I didn't know it was on the web site.

Splendid: It's on the message board.

Nils Frykdahl: It's because it epitomizes the push and pull of our composition process. In general, as a group, our natural tendency is towards this continuous elaboration, but at the same time we're often well aware that the most effective thing you can do as a musical gesture is the simplest. It's a fight to maintain the essential vision of whatever the musical impulse was. Usually it's a simple idea of some kind, in the midst of our joy in elaboration, which we all enjoy doing. You can start with a good, communicable, simple idea, and pretty soon you've worked it into this bewildering morass of detail. That's just our own struggle, trying to maintain the importance of the visceral impact in the midst of our love of texture.

Splendid: Is this a concept album? I couldn't get an overarching story out of it, but it felt like it might be.

Nils Frykdahl: Right. No, it is not. There are definitely some pervading themes, and as we were putting it together, we realized just how unified many of the themes were, and we assembled it with that in mind. The title and everything came into play, but it was not composed as a concept album. Some of the things were composed as a complement to each other -- as little suites. You tend to get groups. The first two songs... the next two are a pair, which then are rebutted by the fifth song.

Splendid: And "Cockroach" and "The Creature" seem to be related; at least the ideas are similar.

Nils Frykdahl: Yeah, "Cockroach" actually comes from a theater piece. As does the "Hymn", the opening piece. We work with this dance theater group, Inkboat. We've got a dancer, the director of Inkboat, and he came along on the tour with us. So it's been a lot of fun. It's his first rock and roll tour. We go to a different town every day. We set up in whatever environment is on offer, as opposed to the controlled theater setting. We've kind of specialized in turning nightclubs and bars into our own little theater.

Splendid: I've heard that your show is incredibly theatrical.

Nils Frykdahl: Given the circumstances, it's fairly theatrical.

Splendid: Is it hard to move all the stuff around that you need to for that kind of experience?

Nils Frykdahl: It's our job, you know. It's a lot of stuff, but as a musician, you're always moving a lot of stuff around anyway. It's just a little more stuff.

Splendid: I know this is your third album, and I have not heard the other two. Can you put it into context for me? How does it relate to the first two albums that you did?

Nils Frykdahl: Well, it's really sort of the second studio album. The second album was a live album. The first album, in terms of its... I'd say there's a lot of continuity, but the first album has different themes. There's less of a social theme, I would say, on the first record. It's a little bit more internal, and this album is a little more external, I guess. It's talking more about the world. I think it has a lot to do with what's happened in the world since three years ago, in 2001, after the first record came out. At least in our awareness of it, the world thrust itself upon us and on just about everyone it seems.

Splendid: Yeah, I guess I was reading some of the songs, especially "The Creature", as political allegories.

Nils Frykdahl: Certainly that is. Also the two songs that Carla sings on the record are both poems adapted by others, but they're both clearly anti-war poems. That's obviously a product of the times. They're both older songs, but there's always been war and anti-war sentiments.

Splendid: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the first two songs, the adversary songs. There's a part in "The Morning Hymn" where this deep voice, I don't know if it's you, comes in and says "I am the adversary." And it sounds an awful lot like that Crime and the City Solution song -- I don't know if you've heard it, it's on the Until the End of the World soundtrack?

Nils Frykdahl: No. I've heard of that group, but I don't know the song.

Splendid: It wasn't intentional? Because it sounds exactly like it.

Nils Frykdahl: Really? Do they say the same line?

Splendid: Yeah.

Nils Frykdahl: Really? Wow.

Splendid: You should check out. It's a great song. That's one of my favorite soundtrack albums.

Nils Frykdahl: That's just...wow, that's an accidental thing.

Splendid: So, who is the adversary?

Nils Frykdahl: In that song, the adversary is ... In the first song, in the hymn, you sort of have this presentation of this messianic hopes of humanity, and it just sort of kaleidoscopes through various versions of that, of this hope for some kind of savior figure in the form of... first you have this sort of Pentecostal person, then there's a more satanic, darker vision that's underlying that in the choruses. And in the choruses, the morning star, that's a reference to the Luciferian hope. So you have all those hopes kind of playing off each other, and echoing each other.

Splendid: It's an interesting song because it has all these opposites in it. Not just between, you know, god and the devil, but in the music. You have this very soft thing and then this crashing metallic music.

Nils Frykdahl: Yeah, and so you've got both these hopes. All of this sort of religious influence. But the savior is going to come from somewhere, and then at the end of the song, this character arises and it's not, in fact, the savior, but is the condemner of the human race. It's an embodiment of the hubris of the human race, in the face of nature.

Splendid: Do you all come from some sort of religious background?

Nils Frykdahl: I wouldn't say there's any unified religious background in the group, no. There are various things that they were raised with or not.

Splendid: I wanted to ask you about "Phthisis", the third song.

Nils Frykdahl: Yeah.

Splendid: That's a word for tuberculosis, isn't it?

Nils Frykdahl: Yeah, a wasting disease, more generally.

Splendid: And obviously that's a metaphor for something. I know that in The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann used tuberculosis as a metaphor for the wasting disease that's basically life. Were you going in that direction or does it have some other connotation?

Nils Frykdahl: Yeah, well, that song is about the Futurists. Actually, that song and the one that follows it, "Bring Back the Apocalypse", are both inspired by the Futurists.

Splendid: The artists?

Nils Frykdahl: Right, but really more the manifestos, which they produced in great abundance. Really, they had a very positive embrace of the new, the world of industry, speed, power and all the things that that supported. So it was the sheer difference from the old that was part of the appeal. The "Phthisis", the wasting, that inspired that song, was the notion they had of their own obsolescence, of their own... the fact of how they'd talk about by the time you're reading this, you'll be burning our books and so be it. And we'll be on to the next thing. We already are. We've already outgrown our first manifesto and we're on to this other thing. And this is how the world is now. In a certain sense, they were very uncanny in their prediction of 20th century history in some ways, the omnipresence of machines in the last... they didn't see the computer coming, but they, in some ways, did see the impact, more and more.

Splendid: So is that a viewpoint that you have sympathy for?

Nils Frykdahl: In the sort of pathetic sense, yes. We have sympathy for their enthusiasm and their positive... ability to look in the face of what's very threatening to the European life of the 19th century and be very fluently bold about it -- this outrageous, nihilist almost, enthusiasm. So that aspect of it, yes, we have sympathy for. On the other hand, the "Freedom Club Song", which follows that pair of songs is the rebuttal to those. That's the ideas of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who was an anti-technologist, living in a little Thoreau shack in Montana. He spent 20 years writing his anti-technological tract and sending out his little hand-made explosives to people he thought of as promoting the rapid growth of technology. And obviously he is... there's the past. The interest in his story is from the contradiction that he represents. He's someone who obviously cares a great deal about the human race, or what he sees as the course that the human race has taken on, in making itself into this enfeebled slave of the techno-industrial complex, which he sees as being essentially master-less... He doesn't necessarily blame the government or any master as being behind it. The technology at a certain point becomes an end in itself, drives itself, almost without any help... and human beings become servants, essentially pushing, always expanding its limits beyond its usefulness. And then uses are found later. But always the initial developments are just because, well, if it can do this, maybe it can do this. People start figuring out ways to implement it and then we'll figure out a way to mass produce it and make sure it's in everyone's homes. That's more of an after-thought really. Anyway, he sees it as a runaway train that is depriving us of our ability to take care of ourselves. And there are others who have addressed this idea that the human race, in the course of furthering itself with technology, has actually made itself physically and intellectually and spiritually weaker. But at the same time, he obviously saw it as necessary or acceptable in his world to then blow the hands off actual human beings to get his point out there. And he himself was a tortured hermit who couldn't really deal with actual human beings at all...he went without talking to anyone for about 20 years.

Splendid: And also, didn't he have advanced degrees in science?

Nils Frykdahl: He was a mathematics guy, a pure mathematics guy. He was a professor at Berkeley during the riot era and couldn't really deal with that. And he left and headed for the hills. He couldn't deal with the whole human scale of that uprising. He wasn't ready for that kind of disorder.

Splendid: It's a fine line between being that smart and being completely nuts.

So, some of your songs are these very dramatic sort of story songs, like "The Creature" and "Morning Star", and then you have these long, instrumental groove oriented songs like "Bring Back the Apocalypse". Is that a function of your live show?

Nils Frykdahl: Yeah. That song definitely evolved out of a live thing. The material for that was written by the drummer.

Splendid: Was this Moe!?

Nils Frykdahl: No, that was actually Frank, who is currently our manager. He started out with this rhythmic material that he had, and we worked on it but we decided to leave it primarily instrumental. He had this riff, something that's evolved and changed a lot live, and now it's got this big sing-along chorus. We hand out music, give it to the audience.

Splendid: Does that work?

Nils Frykdahl: Yeah, it's fun.

Splendid: Your show must get wildly differing reactions in different places, doesn't it?

Nils Frykdahl: Yeah. At best, I think we get a very...you know, people really take the ball and run with it. They really play along. And it will get rowdy, as people join in the spectacle. The other effect that can happen is that people become very passive. They make it clear that they're watching. But as long as the audience do their part...

Splendid: Can you tell by looking out at the crowd whether it's going to work or not?

Nils Frykdahl: You can usually tell within the first few minutes, yes.

Splendid: Where does it go down the best? What are some of your favorite towns to play in?

Nils Frykdahl: Well, we just had some really good shows in Orlando and Gainsville. Chicago. Those just pop to mind as places where it's been very lively. Last night, we had a really fun show here in Mobile, where we'd never played before. We were confused and we didn't think we were playing here, and we went to the wrong town...

Splendid: Really.

Nils Frykdahl: But we found the place. It was really small show at a living room, cafe, record store, hang out center. It was more like playing in a rehearsal room, with people sitting on couches.

Splendid: I imagine that in a small space, you guys would be overwhelmingly loud.

Nils Frykdahl: Loud? No, we can definitely adjust our volume. We do have two drummers, but we always try to play to the size of the room. We're definitely not into volume for its own sake. You can get the crazy effect of volume without being terribly loud. We did play more of our contemplative, sprawling epics than the thrashing rockers.

Splendid: People always talk about how theatrical your show is, and I know you do some things with costumes and unusual instruments. Can you talk about some of the things you do to make it interesting for the audience?

Nils Frykdahl: Well, aside from the instruments and our orchestration, we've been experimenting with different ways of using the space. We've been trying to get the audience to chant things... We have a dancer with us, as I mentioned.

Splendid: Tell me about that -- what kind of dance is it?

Nils Frykdahl: He's primarily a Butoh dancer. I don't know if you're familiar with that?

Splendid: It's Japanese.

Nils Frykdahl: Yeah, it's a dance form that evolved in the 1960s in Japan. It's sort of a reaction to modern dance, Western modern dance. It's a Japanese reaction, following from their own Kabuki and Noh theater, but it's also very much experimental and avant garde. That actually has been really influential on a lot of aspects of the band. We started working with this company several years ago, and I was blown away with his stuff. Here is a dance that's based in dissonance and arrhythmia, as opposed to... Dance music tends to be very consonant and rhythm-based. When I first saw it, the contrast of the electric noise... I was just captured by the feel of it, and I've learned a lot from it as a performer.

Splendid: Like what?

Nils Frykdahl: A kind of ... ah... a kind of restraint, a kind of taking the adrenaline-charged moments of the live performance, always a basic state where a bunch of people feel frenetic, because you're taking in all of this energy from the audience. You feel hyper and most of my early music was that, very hyper. Through Butoh, I've sort of learned to take the moment and let the tension build, through something really slow. It's just playing with tension more, keeping that tension flowing, letting it build up.

And then other, more superficial influences in the sense of the look and the kind of movement that we'll do -- it also follows from that. We paint our faces white and blacken our teeth. We've done some shows where we're taking on a grotesque or making ourselves look old. Embodying blind, crippled or old people, taking a low-to-the-ground posture. That's a basic starting point from Butoh.

And also there's an emphasis on the elemental animal, which obviously figures very prominently in our new record. Again, as an internal exercise, we often try to take on various elements of animals. And that's relating, trying to relate to the non-human world...that's probably the main theme of the record, the new record.

Splendid: Why is that important?

Nils Frykdahl: I think it's important because it's a matter of perspective. That's where the human race is at now. That's our job now. Our next step in consciousness is to realize our smallness rather than revel in our glorious abilities, which we've been doing for a long time. Next we have to take on our weakness, our smallness, our frailty, and how dangerous we are to the rest of the world and to each other. Because otherwise, we're not going to have it at all. This apocalypse that the religious folks have been heralding for millennia has become very real now. That's partly why the religious apocalypse has fascinated so many people, because we have the whole Cold War era that we grew up in. The late Cold War, Reagan, finger-on-the-button era, and this idea of waking up with the missiles coming up out of the San Francisco Bay. There's the potential realness of that. I think that inspires more of a devastation, more slow, sad themes, decay and waste versus conflicting energies in various parts of the globe now. And because it doesn't have that same kind of imminence, the threatening impact of nuclear devastation, it's easier to let it flow.

Splendid: And there also may not be anything we can do about it.

Nils Frykdahl: Well, the things we can do about it -- there are things we can do about it, very definitely. That's one of the messages of the Unabomber: the whole idea that we can't do anything about it and we can't turn back is actually just part of the propaganda of the techno-industrial complex. Or part of propaganda of this Western notion of progress -- the idea that progress is linear and in one direction and it only moves in that one direction, and never can veer. The idea that the return is not part of our thinking. That's going to have to be overcome, otherwise it's a one-way trip.

Splendid: I'm wondering -- do you see your work, your recordings and also your shows, as primarily entertainment, or is it something else, or is it entertainment and something else?

Nils Frykdahl: It certainly is entertainment. I see us as entertainers. I take a certain pride in that aspect of it. But at the same time, I see it as a part of its time and place. We belong to a culture with a long history, and part of that culture is one of self-recognition, spreading ideas, yeah. I don't want to suggest that we are essentially a political group. We're definitely not that. But there are, then again, some social statements about where we are, that's not incompatible with what we do.

Splendid: I know you, at least some of you, have talked about the Art Bears as an influence?

Nils Frykdahl: Oh, yeah.

Splendid: I was just listening to a few clips before I called you, and I can certainly see some similarities in the rhythmic-ness and the operatic vocals. What do you like about them and what do you take from them?

Nils Frykdahl: It's that interplay between a feel of darkness, spaciousness and simplicity, and at the same time, the writing is so tangled and specific and detailed and not dictated by any given expectation. They're not a rock band. So from song to song, and section to section, the music was really dictated by the vision, rather than some compositional, instrumental limitations, and something we try to take on. A new song tends to mean a new instrument. We bring more and more stuff as we add more songs. Homemade instruments...

Splendid: Tell me about some of the instruments you've made.

Nils Frykdahl: Let's see, there's a couple of string-based instruments. There's an eight-foot-long essentially piano string-based instrument that's hammered...

Splendid: That's the slide piano log?

Nils Frykdahl: Yeah. We have an instrument that's essentially a modified version of an electric guitar that's laid down like a lap steel but played with drum sticks. There's a berembow, a Brazilian instrument. We call it the pedal action wiggler because it's mounted on a high-hat stand and played with a high-hat pedal. Basically there's a low string that plunges up and down. And all these things are the creations of Dan Rathbun, the bass player. Then there's amplified metal and strings, a lever with a string on it, that our new instrumentalist has been playing. Michael Mellender

Splendid: This is the guy from Skeleton Key?

Nils Frykdahl: Mellender? No. That's ... the fellow from Skeleton Key is Matthias Bossi. He's the kit drummer.

Splendid: Because Skeleton Key uses a lot of non-standard percussion too.

Nils Frykdahl: Yeah. And then we've got a percussionist. Formerly that was Moe! Staiano, but he's left us, and on the tour and for the future, we have Micheal Mellender, who actually is playing a lot of percussion and some of Moe!'s instruments. He's added some brass.

(I don't quite catch this the first time around.)

Splendid: Some what? Some rats?

Nils Frykdahl: Brass... No we're squeezing rats to get the best sound out of them.

Splendid: Oh, I imagine. I couldn't hear. That sounds interesting.

Nils Frykdahl: But I like the idea of rats.

Splendid: Yeah, maybe next album.

Nils Frykdahl: Next album we'll tour with boxes of rats.

Splendid: And you'll have to have one of those disclaimers that says no actual rats were harmed the making of the album.

Nils Frykdahl: Yeah, no rats were harmed.

Splendid: None of us have any fingers anymore, but the rats are all fine.

Nils Frykdahl: That's right.

Splendid: What about Moe!? He's a founding member and people seem to really like him and now he's gone. What happened?

Nils Frykdahl: Well, basically, he had some other interests and some research that's working on that he wanted to focus on, so yeah, for the foreseeable future, he's going to work on these other projects until he's ready to hit the road again. And maybe that'll be with us and maybe not. It's very amicable. This life of touring and recording, it's pretty demanding. It doesn't leave room for other things. It's a crazy life. We're in a different town every day.

Splendid: So I know you're in the middle of this huge tour and you've got the album coming out in October. Are you working on anything else at this point that you want to talk about?

Nils Frykdahl: With the group?

Splendid: Or otherwise?

Nils Frykdahl: Well, the group has been taking this opportunity...the group has had two pretty new members, Michael having only joined two weeks before we left on the tour. He learned all the material then. And earlier in the year, Matthias joined... so we have really a new influence and also having on this tour, the dancer from Inkboat. It's opened up a lot of possibilities for some new things. After getting a lot of music and touring under our belts, we'll be working on some new theatrical, amazing ideas, working with the dancers. We do a lot of brainstorming ...

Splendid: Then a lot of you are in other bands, as well. I know you're in Faun Fables, others in Tin Hat Trio; how do you keep all those things going at once?

Nils Frykdahl: Well, we just... it's long range planning. We'll all get out our books and plan stuff, going out for the next year or year and a half. That started a few years ago. From the very beginning of this group, a lot of us were already involved in other projects, so we sort of got used to planning that way from the get-go. We realized the idea of unplanned, open time is a luxury. But so far, it's worked out pretty well, with a little pushing and pulling here and there, and back and forth between the tours. In the springtime, we solved one of the crunches by having Faun Fables open for Sleepytime.

Splendid: Didn't you do a show together at SXSW?

Nils Frykdahl: Actually, the SXSW show was the one show we didn't play on the same bill. Sleepytime played with Secret Chiefs, which is basically the label, it's the guys of Mimicry label that our new record is on, and Trey Spruance, who is the guitar player for Mr. Bungle. His primary project these days is Secret Chiefs. The SXSW show as a little label showcase for Web of Mimicry, with us and Secret Chiefs and Estradasphere and a couple of others. Faun Fables was more of a new music show with Devendra...we're not on the same label as Devendra Banhart, but we ended up doing a bunch of shows together.

Splendid: He's great.

Nils Frykdahl: Yeah.

Splendid: You're selling your bus?

Nils Frykdahl: Right, we actually ended up giving the old bus to a punk rock circus troupe in the Bay Area who have a mechanic. We were going to sell it or give it away but to somebody who had a knowledgeable mechanic at their disposal. So we took this opportunity to upgrade to this new bus that we have now, which is a 1962 Highway Cruiser with underbed storage and it's a more powerful vehicle. The other one was a city transit bus.

Splendid: I saw a picture. It looked like it would be very hard to park.

Nils Frykdahl: Yeah, well, you'd be surprised.

Splendid: I have a Honda Accord I have trouble parking sometimes.

Nils Frykdahl: We'd have people out on the street directing people. Backing into traffic. But you get used to it. We cruised this thing around Manhattan.