Not to sound insensitive, but if Niagara wasn't your girlfriend at the time, would she have figured in your plans when you were assembling the band? Did you always envision it as a quartet with a female as the upfront, vocal representation of the band?
To be fair, DAM probably couldn't have happened without her. I was doing film and theater happenings at the time we were living together, and she invited her classmate Mike Kelley to one of those events. (They met each other on a bus on their first day of drawing classes at U of M [University of Michigan].)

Mike brought his roommate Jim Shaw to check us out, and that was the beginning…the band sort of assembled itself when we got together¾ she really didn't figure into it, but she was a main catalyst for it to happen. On our first live performance she didn't get a chance to sing¾ they threw us out as we were warming up! It was also very hard to get her to sing, she was incredibly shy, she was really more of a visual focal point…something to look at, like a statue. People came and gawked at her in vintage wedding gowns splattered with fake blood. She did some creative outfits, early goth-style. She took tips from Morticia in The Addams Family and Edie Sedgewick, her fave superstar….

She really did almost nothing but stand there and powder her face white¾ but she had a look...beautiful, exaggerated makeup, freaky cloths and weird hair-colors¾ we all wore gross ugly outfits, really derelict. I think we were inspired by the group photo on "Trout Mask Replica"¾ we loved that album.

I never thought of DAM as a traditional band: guitars and up-front singers. We cursed everything traditional…. I liked the idea that anybody could join or play in DAM, we had a sort of "open door" policy.

Sorry I asked!
No, I wasn't offended by your question. I do not like nor dislike Niagara, and sometimes wish we had never hooked up¾ but then DAM and other things might not have happened.

Did she join you for the reunion tour?
Yeah she played the first three gigs¾ the last one almost ended in a riot. She's mainly interested in doing boogie-rock. I don't think the art rock/noise approach goes down well with her¾ and that's OK¾ we've always left the door open for her to participate in DAM, but we don't want to go backwards, or do old stuff, and we are not a back-up band…. It's possible things might straighten out in the future and that we could work together on some basis….

DAM preceded "punk music" by several years, although their professed raison d'être was also a reaction against the pomp and circumstance of prog rock, classic rock, the lame El Lay singer/songwriter nonsense that was going on in the early-mid '70s. Would it be fair to say that DAM also came about to be the antithesis of what was cluttering up the air waves [Destroy All Music, if you will], or was it much deeper than that?
DAM was a reaction of disgust to most popular music, and an assault on the "American Dream," but we also had things to celebrate and bring us together¾ we drew inspiration from psychedelic garage rock, free jazz, and the avant-garde…. There's nothing easy or simple about DAM¾ it was (and still is) a complex art collective. Music was part of our expression, but so was painting, collage, film, theater, 'zines, etc…. Each of us brought a unique outlook and these obsessions came together in sort of a massive attack that looks like anarchy, but is really a tuned collage of fine elements. Early performances were pure noise-fests: feedback fuzz drones, squealing amplified toys, screaming, tape loop distortions, bashing metal and drums, etc., but things could get equally soft and quiet¾ we'd go into dreary acoustic goth-folk songs, and extended chord-organ tones.... We played with a lot of traditional structure but just tore it apart. There was some political commentary and an ironic "black humorist" approach¾ some of this grew out of our leftist leanings and sympathies with the White Panther Party, which was already demolished. I think the WPP and Rainbow Peoples Party were important influences. Their use of multi-colored inks and papers for flyers and newsletters (Ann Arbor Sun/Fifth Estate) and the psychedelic designs of artist Gary Grimshaw were beautiful, bold inspirations.

Were you aware of other scenes or artists around the country that you felt a kinship with in the sense that you were all trying to overthrow the musical establishment (whether it be CBGBs in NY or The Whiskey in LA or other small venues around the country)?
I was not aware of anything happening musically like us¾ but there were pockets of interesting things happening¾ such as the LAFMS in L.A., and the Spastic Nihilism Band from Canada, but we found out about them later. We had little interest in the punk/CBGB scene¾ it was boring. I went to CBGBs once and it was just a brawling filthy bar. Detroit had an even crazier version called Bookies club. The Whiskey in L.A. was an awful boogie bar in the '70s, but I did see Roky Erikson there...an amazing show. Punk rock was mostly uncreative drivil. It was all about fashion: saftey pins and leather. We grew up with the MC5 and the Stooges¾ that was the real shit.

I drifted into the mail-art movement in the '70s¾ passing xeroxed-art and 'zines through the mail¾ that was my first awareness and participation with contemporary art. It was an active scene¾ a distribution of art outside gallery walls, [but] it got too large, too quickly, and most people eventually dropped out. I kept a Detroit P.O. Box for Black Hole Records and did weekly mailings¾ the network was happening and that led to an exchange with Ray Johnson, an artist I felt a strong kinship for.

Do you believe that a band requires an audience in order to justify its existence? Is there any point to making music "for yourselves," because isn't that essentially preaching to the choir? I think a band needs an audience to provide feedback.
I think live performance and audience "feedback" is overrated. For the performer it usually comes down to being a quick ego massage¾ the rush of approval¾ and that can be OK for most musicians. There are many reasons I don't enjoy live performance, but the main problem is, as a mode of communication, it seems unnecessary. It's a social need that's fits inside a tribal or ritualistic setting but doesn’t hold my interest.

Contemporary band performance embodies social skills I don't care too much about. I don't mean that we should all work in a total vacuum and never perform live. Duchamp once said "the audience completes the painting"¾ this is also true with music¾ but with recordings made easily available, the need for a sound artist to perform live puts him in competition with "entertainment" and that just becomes the need or obligation to sell a product. When the artist/musician produces mainly for the audience he's negating himself¾ he's putting food on the table and is selling the music as a commercial. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, its just not a primary interest.

Audience response is gratifying, but at the same time it's a superficial reason for making art. There should be just the necessity of making it. Music is a language that's always in the now, and being in the moment of doing it, in producing this "creative act" is really about engaging the imagination. Few live music performances outside of jazz contain that element of immediate creation. It's mostly dead air being regurgatated. Most imaginative thinking can be done in one's head. The mind makes it real. There are probably millions of unseen, unheard masterpieces…this doesn't mean they don't exist¾ and maybe in time they'll be brought into light.

One problem with popular music, is that the sound is always secondary to sales. Rock concerts are basically adolescent mating rituals. They serve the same purpose as pickup bars, and weenie roasts. It pools the youth together, socializes the audience, and breeds good consumers. Most music tends to feed into that system, it becomes a commercial to sell the audience on themselves; feeling good, sexy, or fashionable. It lacks any spiritual space or dimension. The chewy nugget center is missing.

It used to take years before a work of art filtered down and became accepted. Now it takes five minutes. Music is consumed like soda pop, and there's an audience for everything. Good art or music shouldn't have any social purpose.

Then who was the intended audience for DAMs musical outpourings?
We played for ourselves. Our early audiences were very small¾ and did nothing but encourage us to stop playing. We would often play "guerrilla style" and just show up at a party and say we were the band¾ we were always shut down and asked to leave. We often discussed our problem of audience reaction¾ and their basic hatred of us¾ but we kept recording and documenting ourselves despite that. There was a handfull of people that heard us, and supported what we did, but it was miniscule. I guess one reason we fell apart was that lack of support and the difficulty in distributing our work then.

It took us 25 years to find an audience; and it's still a very slim one…. I'm not sure I really know this audience, but they are probably the same marginalized folks that we were back then. Maybe there's a certain schizoid section of the public that relates to it.

What were you trying to do¾ what kind of reaction were you anticipating from your audience?
I'm not sure we knew exactly what we were doing. First, there was no audience¾ we just did our thing like Van Gogh coughed¾ we practised our mad-science for ourselves. I don't think our intention was to shock, but I think that's how it was received. We wanted people to really LISTEN…to open their heads…to witness something apocolyptic or earth-shaking…. Few people could put up with us for long¾ the ones that did were mostly jazz players and fellow art-students.

A lot of your material seems to be more "performance art" as opposed to "straight" music¾ it's not simply a static listening experience that you're looking for. DAM seems to be a participatory experience, almost like a party atmosphere, and that your best vehicle for getting your ideas across is in the live setting.
Everything on the 3xCD set happened live¾ mainly in Mike's basement studio at God's Oasis, sometimes in Jim's bedroom or on the main floor…. Just a few in-concert pieces are on it, most tracks are excerpts from longer pieces¾ we'd usually play for ½ hour or so and then self-critique it…. I don't see us as a "live party band" unless it was the party onboard a UFO…. Our live shows are either amazing or total duds….

A lot of the "songs" seem to be poetry with a musical backing¾ the vocals are more like recitations than "singing." Is this in keeping with your desire to instruct and educate as opposed to entertain a listener?
Niagara, Mike and I just have terrible, monotone voices... it's all God gave us. Jim has a terrific voice, but he rarely sang back then. I never thought of the songs as "instructive," but I like the idea. John Sinclair's 'Blues Scholar' stuff is what I'd call instructive¾ a history lesson about the blues: he does an amazing job with that…. We did reference some historic events and moments in pop culture, but I don't think the intention was explicit. But I am getting more into narratives in recent work.

Tell us some of the influences that were bubbling around in your head when you were formulating the idea for DAM. A lot of it seems inspired by improvisational/political troupes like The Committee. Could DAM be fairly described as a vaudeville act, or an "anti-rock" band?
I had just come to Ann Arbor after a brief stay with [underground filmmaker] Jack Smith over the summer in New York City. Jack was probably the largest influence for me. I was interested in making a midnight theater and happening events in our loft. These were crazy trash versions of heaven and hell plays. We'd plaster Ann Arbor with announcement posters for these events…. [Back] then, Mike and Jim were doing fake posters for happenings that didn't happen, so it was perfect that we would join forces and conspire together.

Musically we were into various oddities: Yma Sumac, Martin Denny, MC5, Stooges, Nico, psychedelic rock, garage bands, Captain Beefheart, krautrock, Varese, Reich, Terry Riley, Sun Ra, big-bands, Arthur Brown, Godz, Silver Apples, etc… DAM was interested in art history; surrealism, dadaism, symbolist poetry, beat lit, avant theater, Artaud, Mad magazine, Crowley's Magick theory, noir movies, Marilyn Monroe and monster films, Stanley Mouse, weirdo trading cards…minimalists we were not. Overthrowing the establishment wasn't as important as propagating our aesthetic.

I don't think of ourselves strictly as vaudeville or comedic¾ (although elements of that are present)¾ a lot of what we did was out of a serious commitment. I think the term "anti-rock band" correctly describes what we were about. DAM is also an "art collective" and that's closer to our identity.

In the mid-late '70s, there was a shakeup in the personnel and you brought in Ron Ashton from The Stooges and Mike Davis from MC5. Did the dreaded "S" word [Supergroup] ever enter into your head?
Both were heroes from my favorite groups… so it was unbelievable that we would be playing together. It was very special to be doing music with them. Their orientation was high-energy rock¾ and the fantasy (playing in my head) was a combo of Detroit metal and freeform psych/noise experimentation. I wanted to incorporate a lot of multi-media¾ sort of a Detroit version of "the exploding plastic inevitible."

I assume you remained friends with Mike and Jim over the years and you reformed in 1995 and staged several reunion tours, captured across a half dozen disks and EPs. What prompted everyone to give it another go after nearly 15 years?
The reunion in 1995 marked over 20 years since DAM formed¾ we had just released the 3xCD set and Kelley was coming to Detroit to give a lecture at the [Detroit] Institute of Arts [DIA]. I had decided to re-release the 'zines from the 70s as the Geisha This book¾ so it came together quickly. We did a couple rehearsals and it happened. We also had an art exhibit of our archives and it was mainly just a fun thing to do. The interest in the CD set was strong and doing a show seemed a proper celebration.

Tell us a little about your new "Swamp Gas" release? Did you get together to record new material simply as a means to finally releasing Mike's 'Dexter 1966' rant¾ was that the springboard for the project?
That was recorded in Detroit around 1999, with members of Monster Island, Marnie Weber (Jim's wife), and Anneke Auer of Rotterdam also helping out. We recorded the music long before we added Mike's text. His 2002 text was a replacement for "'The Colors of UFOs"¾ a piece Mike wanted to use for another project, so I was waiting for something that would work with the space theme and music.

We discussed doing a "Swamp Gas" project as we went up north in Michigan to visit the "Shrine of the Pines"¾ a 1920s cabin full of surreal handmade furniture…. When Mike came to town for the opening of the "Artists Take On Detroit" exhibition at the DIA¾ (both Mike and DAM had art installations in the show), we recorded his text at the bookstore [Cary's Book Beat shop] and I overlaid it later with the music. I was also working on "The Map Of Eternity," an interactive collage and website project of UFO, channeling, garage rock, and psychedelic trip descriptions. Some of that were incorporated into the Swamp Gas Gazette, a UFO 'zine we put together that accompanies the CD. The eternity map is also featured as the menu and title page for Blastitude #13, a website journal I'm guest editing at www.blastitude.com.

How did you come into possession of the Sun Ra vocal track that you sample throughout?
I've been working on a Sun Ra book and CD project for the past five years. I've collected original recordings and interviews, and commissioned some writing and artwork for it. Sun Ra did a week of concerts before New Year's 1980, at the Detroit Jazz Center. They did three shows a day, and played every song in their repertoire. John Sinclair recorded them all off the sound board and it's been our dream to one day release all these recordings¾ probably a 10 CD set! [Another Terrascope exclusive announcement!]

There's also some material provided by Japanese "noisebrother," Violent Onsen Geisha. Did you meet him during your tour of Tokyo and take the tapes back to weave into the project?
I contacted Nakahara (Violent Onsen Geisha) about a year before we went to Japan, and we played a few dates with him in '96. I was a fan of his noise/collage projects (and he also was into DAM). When I mentioned the "outer-space" project DAM was doing, he agreed to send us some samples for it¾ he ended up sending us three CDs and we just placed them randomly throughout "Swamp Gas." I should also note that "Swamp Gas" was a single long take, edited into separate tracks.

Was your tour of Japan an eye opener in the sense of how people still appreciated what DAM had accomplished? Are you more popular over there than in your own country?
Japan was a great experience. In terms of music, it's incredible how noise and fringe rock had developed into this huge mass of support and energy. It was mainly among young teenagers who followed this stuff. It's hard to imagine all these kids seriously following noise bands¾ it's such marginal and lightly covered stuff in the USA. The Boredoms were like folk-heroes, recognized and stopped on the streets. There was this respect and attention given to artists that would never happen over here.

DAM seemed to have a fan base and a history that was already known about in Japan. We spent one day doing nonstop interviews and reporters had an amazing knowledge of this stuff. It was always one of our dreams to play Japan, so it was a great honor to play there, (even though the main show in Tokyo was sort of a flop).

Although you've moved on to Monster Island, is DAM still an active project and do you envision any tours, perhaps to promote "Swamp Gas"?
DAM is still an active group, it just goes into "sleep-mode" often after a performance. We played at the "All Tomorrows Parties" festival at UCLA in March, 2002, which was an amazing event¾ an incredible gathering of over 100 avant-garde sound groups from across the world¾ one of the most inspiring concerts I've been to. So once every year or two, DAM gets together and we do our noise chaos…. Since the reunion gigs in '95 we've played Osaka and Tokyo (1996), Rotterdam and Vienna (1998), Seattle (2000), and Los Angeles (2002).

We recently had an installation of four large murals and video art in the Whitney Biennial in NYC, but getting us in a van and hitting the road is probably out of the question. We each have too many professional and family commitments, and besides we're not big fans of playing live¾ it generates a lot of anxiety. We did three reunion gigs in 1995 and were booted off stage in San Diego¾ actually we were unplugged like the old days, and there was almost a small riot.

I could see us playing special events, or doing a few more art-related things¾ mixing the performance with a new installation, or playing inside the installation. We hope to put out a reissue of the 3xCD set, and possibly a double-CD from live shows of the past six years. Mike is now editing that work.

The earlier DAM material seems rooted in Zappa's approach to cacophonous mind manipulation.
That's a large leap from early DAM to Zappa! He was really an anal perfectionist that constructed his work almost note for note (and that's not meant necessarily as a negative thing). We'd probably be recorded on Straight/Bizzare if we formed five years earlier. Although Zappa took a much more traditional and rarefied approach to music, we both admired the same avant-garde: Varese, Cage, Partch, Reich, etc., but our approach to recording and end results were very different, almost opposite….

DAM was playing with chance happenings, psychedelia, theater, ironic humor, crackpot instruments, and lo-fi recording. I don't think the word "control" was in our vocabulary, and we could never reproduce or do the same thing twice. We made postmodern, homemade "elemental" ESP-style trance noise-rock, which was far more gritty, obscure and spontaneous than Zappa.

The overlap is probably in the tongue-in-cheek satire department and our use of parody and black-humor. However, most of the songs done under Xanadu came about through visionary experiences. The lyrics and music were composed under altered states of conciousness, even the EP sleeve design was connected to a vision.

It's interesting that you view it as Zappa-esque or "mind manipulation," I was seriously trying to deal with a mental state I was not in control of then. Music and poetry were my safety nets. [The Xanadu material] represents a very different (more dark and removed) body of work. It was the only project we did, but I really enjoyed working with Ben and Laurence¾ both sensitive, multi-talented musicians. They brought masterful playing and off-kilter ideas into Xanadu. I hope an expanded CD will show this in a better light.

After hearing the retrospective, I'll never listen to another Bongwater album in the same light or snicker at the juvenile delinquency of Beavis & Butthead or those Mystery Science Theater videos and marvel at their so-idiotic-it's-brilliant thesis anymore.
I recently heard Bongwater just a few years ago when Mike Kelley and Art Byington played as Ann Magnusen's backing band in Los Angeles¾ Jim Shaw also painted and designed Ann's "Luv Show" CD. I think they were much more connected to producing conventional music then we were.

I've rarley seen Bevis and Butthead, but Mystery Science Theater was something I dug and watched at my friend George's house almost every Saturday night. That show expressed our attitude when we watched those grade Z bombs in the '60s and '70s, and as DAM we soaked up a lot of those at God's Oasis.

In the '60s there was a TV horror-show host named Ghoulardi from Cleveland who had a shtick of making fun of all the bad movies. In early '60s Detroit, we had "Morgus The Magnificent," and The Ghoul in the '70s. Vampirella did the same thing in Los Angeles. I like the idea of commentary and farce¾ the burlesque of the real (or unreal)¾ there's a high level of parody in the works you mentioned, but as an approach and technique its nothing original. I always cite Mad magazine as being a major influence. We grew up with that beautiful, Mad-genius stuff, ¾ hilarious, mind-blowing, as psychedelic as anything in the late '60s¾ artists like Wolverton and Virgil Partch cast a long shadow on us.

Did it frustrate you to see the attention heaped on these obvious "appropriators" of your aesthetic, and are you concerned that folks picking up "The Third Mind" might just shrug it off as "retro-juvenalia" and ignore it's cultural significance?
I think parody and black humor show up in all these projects. It concerns me that this parodistic reading may be misread as the sole meaning behind Nightcrawlerz; it's there, but not really central to our project, which I consider to be orthodox and spiritually based. My intention in putting out "The Third Mind" was to complete a documentation of a ten-year project that Barry Roth and I began in the late '70s. We were concerned with meaning in poetry, poetic invention, the sound of words¾ "projective verse" and the raw "sound" of sounds¾ the essence of things…getting to the nucleus of matter and form, stripping meat from the bones. Nightcrawlerz was a complex collage and constructionist word-based project that focused on the repetition and chant of sound and words to alter their meanings. There were many layers and different directions explored over ten year's time. We sent hundreds of Nightcrawlerz 'zines to artists around the world¾ we tapped into the mail-art network and did some collaborations (both audio and visual) with Ray Johnson, an important figure in Fluxus and pop-art circles.

After DAMs implosion, were you anxious to continue with the same modus operandi and return to what DAM was originally intended to accomplish, or was Nightcrawlerz really nothing more than what it sounds like: a couple of friends fooling around with a bunch of tapes, toy instruments, answering machines and too much time on their hands trying to change the world from the comfort of their own basement?
When I left DAM in '77, it lost most of its drive and imagination, and was headed in the direction of punk rock¾ the popular idiom of the time. I decided to return to photography and finish a degree at Wayne State University in Detroit, which is where I met Barry Roth, who was an instructor. In one sense Nightcrawlerz was a return to the innocence and experiment of early DAM, but we were into a serious investigation into literature. Gysin and Burroughs were a strong influence. We made collages of poems, drawings, photos, sculptures, and sculptures of sound molded and played with the layers; encoding with signs, Kabbalah notation, and neo-Beat jargon¾ we tried to keep the work "outside ourselves." While it dealt with daily personal material, it had universal designs. It served as diary, story telling, and magic offering. Nightcrawlerz' projects were clumsy organic stews¾ the music hummed like a devotional chant. Maybe it was an attempt to create a new monster¾ a golom that could live and protect us. As poet-musicians, we were too stupid/naive to make anything easy or clear, let alone "change the world." I guess the humor sometimes eclipsed the spiritual intent, and to really change the world we need to work on ourselves.

I understand you recorded over fifty 90 minute cassettes worth of material and whittled it down to about 2½ hours and two disks worth of mayhem. Was the selection process as harrowing an experience as recording the material in the first place?
It wasn't too bad. I transferred anything that sounded interesting onto about 12 mini-discs¾ that took a couple months. Then Warn Defever and I edited the pieces down into short sections in a few days. We saved a few long works, but our aim was to get the statement down quickly and go on. We let the computer randomly do the final selection and track layout.

Some of the material sounds like it was a very time-consuming affair to assemble. I'm particularly fond of what you did on "John Lennon." [The track¾ nothing on here could really be honored with the appelation "song"¾ begins with excerpts from a live newscast describing his assassination, brilliantly incorporates Barbara Stanwyck begging "Johnny" not to die [from the film, Meet John Doe], and then segues into some interviews with folks who attended a Beatles concert. It's chilling the way a totally out-of-context clip from the reaction to John Lennon "live" (in concert) is juxtaposed with almost the exact same reaction to his death.] Your liner notes: "OK, scary, use it, maybe Yoko will sue us! Kool!" I assume you haven't heard from "Mrs. Lennon?"
I heard from Yoko a few years ago. She sent a small drawing with a note that said, "I'll be seeing you on Monster Island one day." (This was after I sent her a copy of the first Monster Island LP), but the piece about Lennon was done from material recorded the night he died. I had a few cassettes of these radio and TV newscasts¾ everyone commenting on Lennon's life and death. I just couldn't get away from it and recorded everything¾ it was really made out of shock or disbelief…. The film Meet John Doe was also playing that night, and it seemed to fit into the surrealness of it. Lennon's death was a heavy trip, and it was a way to work through it. The editing on most of "The Third Mind" is pretty straightforward¾ we just tried to cut out a lot of repetition. Everything was assembled with multiple tape recorders, playing along with us live. Our major technique was splicing tape-loops into repetitve poems or soundscapes.

Did Nightcrawlerz just peter out, or did you and Barry get bored with all the work involved in assembling these sound collages with limited financial return on investment?
Barry had a family to raise and I was trying to get the bookstore afloat¾ responsibilities kept creeping in and made it difficult to continue. We also said what we wanted. Just recently we held a small retrospective of our artwork. We've remained close friends and are collaborating on some new sculptural pieces. It's hard to say if we'd go back to recording. There may be an opportunity to produce a Nightcrawlerz theater piece in the future¾ that's a direction I've always wanted to take. It would open the process up, and I think our sketches and routines would work well in 3-dimensions¾ dance or dramatic presentation.

This also seems like the second "supergroup" you’ve been involved with—this time with some of the major players of the Detroit alternative scene?
I think of Monster Island more as an "anti-supergroup"¾ no flash or talent showoffs, just friends getting together and slowing down.... My hope is we can transcend some of the trappings of our past and individual identities. I always liked Godzuki [Erika Hoffman], Outrageous Cherry [Matt Smith], and His Name Is Alive [Warn Defevre]¾ they were/are some of the more creative bands in Detroit. It's always a special natural thing when we get together, and it gives us a chance to try out something different.

You don't so much sing the lyrics as recite them. In this respect, are the songs more like poetry set to music, and is that MIs preferred modus operandi?
I have a monotonal voice with no range, so I try to get other people to do vocals when I can. I'm getting into storytelling with sound¾ "Peyote Mind" [see below] and "Fantomas" are examples [the band recently completed the DVD soundtrack for the re-edited version of "Fantomas" (entitled "Fantomash"), which was presented at the Boijman Museum in Amsterdam in October]—it’s like adding a document into song...putting another layer on top. I think Erika interprets the songs well¾ her voice is child-like and lyrical, so there's a strange balance between singing and recitation.

The communal vibe around these releases reminds me also of early krautrockers Amon Düül and the ethnic world/folk of Atman/Magic Carpathians and Japanese folk/psych band Ghost. Do you regularly "test the waters" to see what types of music are out there that might benefit from the Cary Loren Treatment¾ great name for a band, that!
Thanks, that's great company¾ I was familiar with Amon Düül, Can, and Kraftwerk in the early ‘70s, and Atman and Ghost in the mid-‘90s. [As Cary mentioned earlier, the members of what was to become Monster Island initially met at a Ghost concert!] Also, Erica Pomerance's late ‘60s ESP freakout disk was a real revelation. I loved Vivaldi's chamber music and Ginsberg's treatment of Blake's poems as a teenager, so everything you experience is probably assimilated somehow…. But I don't approach music as subject for a certain style or "treatment." It must have meaning first. The truth of the moment is an important practice. This gets reinforced when you perform with people focused on the same ideas. Monster Island is basically an acoustic "low volume" band¾ the approach to improv relates well with free-jazz and junkyard "folk" creation.

Communal bands sometimes have this tight and responsive nature that's a reflection of love or energy within the group. Shared ideals and backgrounds work together. All bands in a sense are communal¾ you get together to produce something. Music is one of the most social, yet anti-capitalist artforms and there lies its beauty: it's untouchable, in the air and free.

The name Monster Island conveys a sense of both unity and isolation¾ the various ethnic rhythms and instruments of African, Chinese, Indonesian, Indian, and Haitian music would identify us as a world music bastard. I've always liked the idea of islands¾ the flowery exoticness, isolation and genetic creativity. The island where all monsters are allowed to exist in peace seemed idyllic. The name also links us back to the motherband [DAM].

Was there a lot of backlash from people who didn't realize that 'Hiroshima Bop' was an antiwar song and not a tribal dance celebrating politically sanctioned murder, whether it be at Dachau, Hiroshima, Kent St., Sarajevo, etc.
That was a song DAM did in rehearsals before we went to Japan. I thought it would be a good antiwar song to do¾ "looking at the fire thru the eyes of the dead." It was written for the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, but no one wanted to do it¾ they thought the Japanese would misunderstand it so it was dropped. I like doing that, as it always ends in a big percussion freakout. I was trying to link all these atrocities together¾ we have a great capacity for destroying ourselves in new and surprising ways.

"Confessions" sounds like Lou Reed leading a Hari Krishna marching band with shakahachi, bells, etc. clattering around in the background. Yet this particular track was dedicated to Sonic Youth. Tell us about the connection with SY, particularly with that song?
It's about the life of Antonio Gaudi: "killed by a streetcar your work left undone"…"Islamic mosaics, pulsing hypnotic"..."walls bejeweled, and windows elliptic." He was a Catalan architect who was run over by a streetcar and never saw his major masterpiece, the Salgrada cathedral, built: "Barcelona in shadows that crumble and die…." It’s a massive structure still under construction today¾ one of the most dazzling, organic, neo-baroque buildings.

Another theme in 'Confessions' is the Spanish Inquisition: "the torturer, he is your lover too…," which came out of the Garcia-Marquez novel, Of Love And Other Demons and the book Poison by Kathryn Harrison. Both song and books explore relationships between authority: priests/executioners and the sexual attractions to their victims and their forbidden lusts: "opening your flesh and seeking the truth…."

The underpinnings of "catholic guilt"¾ body/mind/soul conflicts and commentary on social hypocrisy also are rampant in Sonic Youth¾ it's a recurrent theme they explore. There's also the unfinished/raw soundscapes SY bring to their music¾ a kind of baroque form of rock 'n' roll which reminded me of Gaudi's catholic structures: odd angles, psychedelic and sensuous textures…. Actually, I gotta fess up: I stole a few chord progressions and odd tunings from a SY song¾ 'Cotton Crown' I think¾ I saw it in one of those Guitar Player articles¾ a totally shameless rip-off...so I thought 'Confession for Sonic Youth' could also be read in a literal sense… The song was also covered by DAM on our "Silver Wedding Anniversary" album.

You're obviously a voracious reader. A lot of literary references appear throughout your various projects, from the obvious (Gysin, Burroughs, Appolonaire, Tennyson) to the implied (Artaud, Lautremont, the existentialists like Camus and Sartre, and the Soviet anarchists), and you also run The Book Beat shop. Tell us how you became involved with that?
The Book Beat opened in 1982¾ I was unprepared to make a living doing anything else. I collected and sold books while in school. In the fine-arts field you either go into teaching, or try and market yourself. Neither looked promising to me. Bookselling was something one can do while still being somewhat antisocial. It became a successful venture despite my lack of business sense and now helps to support some of these projects.

Tell us about The Gallery. You've put on shows here, but I'm not too sure what the whole concept is about.
The Book Beat Gallery began soon after we opened. I show artwork that intrigues me or that I find interesting. Mainly photography and folk-art. I'm not really a "galleriest"¾ marketing and sales are not the point. I have a small space and try to launch creative exhibits onto an unsuspecting public. It helps to keep me stimulated¾ the gallery is an education and connects us to the community¾ Detroit can be a bleak space, and this is one of the saner areas.

Throughout your career, your material also has many references to modern culture, particularly in the realm of science fiction: Dr. Phibes, Mothra [the title of a song on MIs second album, "Dream Tiger"], Godzilla, et. al. Is that just a genre you find ripe for inspiration or material, or do you think there's more to SF than meets the eye…adhering, perhaps, to the preferred translation of "S.F." as "speculative fiction"?
I'm not a big reader of SF, but am a fan of monster movies and monster movie soundtracks¾ I guess it's stuff I grew up with and still find fascinating. There are parallels to how we as a society view and picture monsters and how we reflect our fears and phobias onto the face of them. Space aliens with mutated bodies, giant heads, lagoon creatures, zombies, and oozing blob liquids were prominent in the '50s at a time we were [also] hyper-conscious of sexuality, car fins, and the godliness=cleanliness=USA virtues, so our monsters were these sick gross concoctions, projections of our fears. Then the hi-tech robotic/bionic transformer Robocop look of the '80s escalated with the dominance of computer technology. We kind of sublimate our fears and anxieties and project them onto the movie screen. I also love the soundtracks in monster flicks¾ it's usually the most extreme experimental music. In DAM, we used to play along with some of these movies, mixing the movie background noise with our own.

It's so different from the "regular" MI releases, I wonder where you see that project heading. Do you intend on continuing in the wyrdfolk direction on studio releases, but break into avant skronk whenever you hit the stage?
I really don't know where it's headed. I'd like to do a couple more "song" albums, but it might all fall apart and go somewhere else. Playing our songs live is difficult. You need an attentive, quiet audience to pull it off, which is rare to find in Detroit, so we usually opt for the freeform improv [which the band performed with poet Ira Cohen in December].