Best Fetus Forward

Rip It Up, Issue 103, 1 February 1986, Page 10

Best Fetus Forward

Jed Town & Serum Fort from A Womb with A View

It takes a certain turn of mind to live right in the heart of Auckland, a real determination. We're not talking about the “inner city” flats advertised in the paper in pansy bloody Grey Lynnor Newmarket, or even Ponsonby. We're talking within a sniff of the exhaust fumes of Queen Street, the White Lady for breakfast. - i " The council forbids it with bylaws, makes it increasingly unlikely by 4 allowing old, cheap buildings to be slaughtered in favour of cold glass towers. Every now and then it trumpets its efforts in keeping the inner city alive by announcing the creation of half a dozen luxury flats to sell at 200 grand apiece to people who inhabit the city for the time it takes to walk from the Fuego to the offstreet door. s The soul of the city is the individuals who carve out niches despite landlords and bylaws and lack of plumbing and actually Jive in the place. e Jed Town’s niche, Fetus Productions HQ, is two and a half rooms in an office building with bedroom-kitchen, lounge ... and 16-track studio. The walls are decorated with the paraphernalia of the F Prods career so far; pix, posters and artwork from Australia, Japan, Europe, the Windsor “Fetus Productions? They're Australian aren't they?” : : The current New Zealand end of Fetus Productions is Jed Town and Serum Fort. He was once in the Features and she was once a Snoid sister with precocious North Shore music/theatre group the Plague. They formed about four years ago in Sydney, with another NZer, Broxin. The fourth member, a woman called Pola, still lives in Sydney also. 4 ik Jed is tall and slim, not ordinary looking, but the only outwardly unsual thing about him is his two top front teeth, filed to points, a-legacy of the first sojourn in Sydney. Serum is pale, with long

blonde hair and slightly distant eyes. She talks in a sing-song voice, with an accent from some imaginary foreign country. She can sometimes be hard to follow; her trains of thought seem to connect in different ways than most peoples. They're both softly friendly, far from the forbidding figures some of the music might suggest. Recorded output thus far is: Untitled LP (1981); Fetalmania EP, 1982; Self Manipulation cassette (1982); The Perfect Product cassette (compilation of old and new material, packaged in Japan, 1983); Environmental LP (recorded on four-track, mainly by Broxin, 1984, as yet unreleased here); The Perfect Product EP (released late 1985); and the newly-released album, Luminous Trails. There have also been various other film, art and writing projects under the Fetus Productions banner. As Jed says: ' , “l think everyone's got their own place in Fetus Productions. That's a point Id like to clarify. I'd like it to be known that Fetus Productions is like a company name and within the company is different groups. There’s the Perfect Product of course, and Environmental with Broxin. The three of us started the thing together and we've all gone in different directions for a while and contributed to different things which individuals have got together themselves. So there are other people besides us two in Fetus Productions” The album is mainly Jed’s work, and mainly

recorded at Sydney’s Groovex Studios early last year. The songs were written as they were recorded, Jed working closely with the studio’s owner, a chap named Groove: : “I basically come up with an idea and record it on four-track, just to get the structure. Then | just like to spend time trying different things out and after three or four months come up with a finished product” As well as Jed's guitar, the recording uses sampled sounds from an Emulator, and a DX7 synth. Tracks were digitally mixed at another studio and then transferred onto a 1950 s vintage Revox tape recorder, “to bring back a bit of warmth”. The process began to get hurried after Groovex started folding as the result of a letdown on a costly film soundtrack deal. So two tracks for the album, ‘lt's Alright’ and ‘Sparks Fly’ had to be done in the home studio in Auckland. Strangely enough, they attain almost the same sparkling recording quality. And a warmth uncommon to electronics-dominated music ... “Yeah | think a lot of electronic music does sound cold — mainly because all the instruments are very similar, there's only one tonal quality” : : It's also unusual for music methodically put together with what are normally considered “cold” instruments to make such unashamed plays on the emotions as Fetus music does.

- “Yeah. | think that sort of happens naturally. When you're working on stuff you don't know how or why you're playing it and it's coming out and if you're satisfied with it, it must have rubbed off from the last few months that you've worked on it and lived. It was a strange time back then ..”

... and Kicking! : Fetus Productions shows in Auckland this year have been two-parters. There's the Perfect Product, which brings in Simon Alexander on Emulator and keyboards and plays music similar to the new album — and the Fetals, with Deberly from Bird Nest Roys on second bass guitar, a wild white-noise punk band (lan Gilroy drums for both lineups). Was the Fetals thought up in an attempt to show the songs could work in a very direct, immediate way? - “Yeah, you don't have to think about it on stage, whereas with Perfect Product theres a lot of things happening when you're playing. You've got to be aware that this is going on, and if you don't it won't be there, and I'm just getting used to that now. The Fetals were like a release in a way, you didn't have to worry about what you did — those songs are quite easy to play and you can just forget about playing and do what you feel at the time. It's something | really like. It's as important to me as the Perfect Product. :

“l would like to maybe introduce, rather than just having straight drums, some metallicsounding things, just to make it sound a little bit different than an everyday punk band. It'll be fine.... : you'll get it right sometime ... , ~ Live performances with the Perfect Product took some time to get together after you returned to NZ. %

“Yeah. | had to work out how the hell we were going to do it. Because a lot of that stuff, Luminous Trails, is 16 tracks — and | like the idea of making something sound better than the record. So | want to be able to use all these instruments and, as time goes on, try to mix live on stage or something. Like mixing in the stu-

dio, to be able to use all those instruments and have control over them, so you're actually inventing new things as you go on. It’s really hard at the moment because we've never had a mixer who's been with us longer than a day before we've played. So there's never been any organisation on that part, which Id like to rectify soon.” How much sequenced and pre-recorded stuff are you using? : “There's no sequencers at all. It's just recorded stuff, onto a QXI digital thing, so it's aimost like it’s played as it’s played on the record. The basic track, the bass and rhythm and a few certain subtleties, with the guitars and keyboards played on top of it and the drums bringing out more of a live sound, rather than that stale drum machine sound. 2

“I've got to get it right some time. It started coming together towards the end, because we were a bit more relaxed. But I'd still like to have a bit more control over it, rather than not knowing what the hell’s going on. When you're on stage you're going ‘Where’s the bass? Where's the echo on this? and it hasn’'t sounded half as good as it should.”

One of the things that made the last Windsor gig — the good one — work was the sheer atmosphere of the place that night. “Yeah, that’s the whole thing. If you don't have the atmosphere it's pointless playing.” :

... and Vision? Fetus Productions performances used to be -as notable for the films and slide shows as much as the music. Why have you cut the visuals out? “It was a kind of test, just to see what it would be like. And our stage presentation sometimes is fairly stagnant, we dont move very much sometimes. And | can't stand watching bands playing where there doesn’t appear to be much involvement — it's like they're reading music or something. And | think I'm realising now that the visuals are an integral part of the Perfect Product, they convey a lot of emotion as well, and we don't have to worry about much apart from getting the music right, so it gives us a lot more freedom and retains that kind of visual enjoyment.” Is that why you sometimes use the blood capsules and so on? | know some people who really hate that ... - - Jed looks surprised and Serum chimes in: “Yeah, it's funny! It really makes you notice it — I've had about three people say that” ; “l haven't had one ..” says Jed. “Why do they hate it?” . “I think there’s lots of angles you could hate it from,” she says. “One is that if you want to see violence or something like that, you should really cut yourself, or it's not extreme enough, so it’s a wal-ish thing. And then it’s ‘how dare you put yourself in such a wal-ish position?. ” | think some people don't like it because it's theatrical. “I don't actually act. When I'm doing it, | don't act — | just like doing it. I'm not really trying to be theatrical. | mean, people have got their own ways of getting a kick out of things, this is my way of doing it” The Beatles Ethic : You write some kinda pop songs. Do you think Fetus Productions have the ability to be really popular, sell lots of records? ‘ “Yeah, definitely” ‘ ; And still make really good, interesting, maybe weird, records ... - e “Yeah, | wouldn't sacrifice the music to do that, definitely not. | would have done that a long time ago if I'd wanted to” Serum: “It's funny really, because when you see films, people accept really strange music from films. Lots of soundtracks can be quite musically interesting” - People accept weird films more readily than weird music too. e »

“Oh yeah — films like Brazil. The equivalent of that in music ..” ;

Jed: “I think the idea all along has been for us to get into doing films anyway.” : Does that thing of popularity without compromise constitute the Beatles Ethic? : “Yep. | don't think they ever compromised at all”

Think it could still happen? “It depends on how weird you are | suppose. Everyone wants something different to come through, so | suppose youd have to be really different to be that big” - : You're a bit of a notorious Lennon fan ...

“Notorious ... everyone reckons | sound a bit like John Lennon and | admit I've been a Beatles fan since | was about seven, so | suppose you pick up something. But | don't regard him like a hero or anything. He's just another human ... but

| feel very close to him, I'm sure there’s been some kind of connection there, a very small connection.” s ~

SHOCK Does it concern you that a lot of people still regard the name and the earlier visuals (of babies born deformed, etc — the idea being to emphasise that Everything has beauty, not just the conventionally aesthetically beautiful) as shock tactics? “Not really, no. My father often accused me of that being the whole idea of doing it, but | didn't really worry about it. But he's come around to it now.” Serum: “Jed’s good at defending it to people, but | find it harder, because the level at which they've thought about it is totally different to the level I've thought about it. Usually | find that if I've been shocked by something, not necessarily in a nasty way or anything, but by something | can't comprehend, | tend to carry it round for a while and look at all aspects of it. Whereas | can see that immediate reaction too — which is really suspcious, suspicious of peoples’ motives.”

Jed: “Yeah, that's right. It’s like the film Eraserhead. When | first saw it, | wasn't shocked by it, but | was definitely impressed by it. And then after seeing it three or four times | liked it even more. It's different every time — you see it in a different way. , “Because everything’s got a story hasn't it? And some stories are so simple they can be amazing or completely boring because you've seen it a thousand times. It's only where the story kind of loses itself and you have to pick up the pieces together ... | think that's where Id like to keep heading, that kind of direction. It's quite a discovery sometimes.” Serum: “But you've gotta be rough. That's why you've got to not worry about peoples’ reactions like that. There are some things that you hear and that are so designed not to have any controversy in them or anything at all that makes you think. There's excellent stuff and there’s really good bad stuff — that’s why | even like bad stuff. Something that’s quite astoundingly bad, at least there's something in it. Things like Duran Duran, when | hear it | can't even think that | don't like it, because there's nothing you can pick out and say ‘oh, wanky drums’ or something. It’s like it's just designed to try and offend as little as possible” :

To Come The Perfect Product won't be appearing live again for two or three months, but a tour by the Fetals, possibly for Orientation, is a distinct possibility. Jed and Serum also want to finish the film they’re working on together (you got a glimpse of their handiwork with the video for ‘Flicker’ from the EP). While Jed concentrates on the music, Serum has also been working on another film with Richard Von Sturmer and some of her own writing. And Jed wants to ... “Just develop the sound that’s coming out now. This group’s been playing this type of music for years and it's got to diversify a little bit. The production in particular I'm interested in, trying to find that. Songs like ‘Anthem’ and another song called ‘Mg, which isn't on the record, the guitars are creating, harmonics | suppose is the word, so that everything’s got a ring to it — it's almost like a whistling. Id like to get a really strong pulse, so the harmonics and the whole sound are ringing together. Just get this really powerful pulse happening.” : "Have your motivations changed?” “l think the main motivation has just been to be more in the atmosphere that | enjoy. Rather than going out to fulfill something, I've basically found what | want to do and I'm just continuing it So | think the motivation’s still the same”

Russell Brown

A 83875.85