This song started as therapy. Specifically scream therapy for myself, but for Boom and Twitch it was full-blown music therapy with the three of us crammed in that oppressively hot practice space in the pre-gentrified Denver railyards in the Spring of 1994. I had recently quit my job at an electronics firm after the boss had cornered me and given me the ‘Come to Jesus’ speech about my lack of discipline and loyalty. You know the one, the one where they tell you that you should be grateful for sucking the piss out of their cocks for 40 hours a week at minimum wage as if they were doing you a favor? Yeah, THAT speech. So I was still emotionally cockeyed a week later screaming what would become the chorus. The song was laid out and roughly sequenced in a matter of hours, and come to think of it, Waster was probably the fastest we have ever written a song and tweaked it to our liking. A few days later we recorded our new creation at Free Reelin’ Studios onto a 16-track reel to reel analog recorder, where the real magic happened. That hollow noise at the beginning and end of the song was actually the sound of the cockroach-proof freezer from Boom and my apartment on Capitol Hill, which Boom promptly used as inspiration for layers of building guitar feedback. At the same time we were recording the “album version” of the song we decided we should sequence the extended dance mix of the song as long as everything was plugged in and sounding epic. We recorded through the night until about 10:00 AM the following morning. We were all late to our day jobs, but we didn’t care. We were all amped on that high you get when you create a work of art you are actually proud of. Fast forward a year later we were signing to the now legendary Re-Constriction Records and Chase, our Label Boss and greatest champion, didn’t want to release the then-finished State.of.Decay for our “first” album to the world. Instead he wanted a “Best of” from the first three full-length albums we recorded on our own (including our first two as The Watchmen) and new tracks. And of course Waster was one of the first tracks chosen for what would become Tactiq. Which set us down the dangerous path of revisiting previous work. After almost a year of recording at various studios around Denver and not finding another engineer or producer who had even HEARD of Nine Inch Nails, much less White Zombie (Me: Do you even watch MTV? Captain Ego: No, do you listen to Air Supply? Me: I guess we’re even.) we decided to buy our own home studio gear and craft the album we always wanted to make on our own time. Poor Chase was sweating bullets over our impending release date with those sub-par mixes and proposed that we release our remix EP first to give us time to finish the full-length album. In February 1996 the world was introduced to not one, but three remixes of Waster on Entropy Lingua and finally in July of 1997 came the “Official Album Mix” on Tactiq. The beast had been unleashed and we could all go on about our lives. Well, not even close. In 2007 when Society Burning reformed out of the ashes, I dusted off the archive of DAT tapes (that’s Digital Audio Tapes for the uninitiated) and proceeded to digitize everything. It was then that I made a watershed discovery; I actually liked our music. No, not a strong enough word. I loved our music again. And more importantly I was no longer ashamed of that period of my artistic life. I dove headlong into remastering our previous albums while we got back to work on the newly-resurrected Internal Combustion. Several revised track listings later State.of.Decay was finally released including the original mixes of Waster (having been rechristened the Parthenogenesis Mix and the Atrophy Rising Extended Mix). Fine, now we can go on with our lives, right? Wrong. Funny things happen to art unleashed on the internet. Over the years trolls have posted the music and lyrics of Waster on several Christian music websites (some posts are still there). Which is really funny when you think about it, but I never intended this song to be an assault on organized religion, it is an assault on social and economic inequality. So with this thought in mind several weeks ago I rolled up my sleeves, fired up Adobe AfterFX and using the original album artwork as a launching point I made this lyric video. The artwork itself was a collage I had made with the amazingly talented Rob Cruz shortly before our exile to Denver. We wanted to visually represent Industrial music in a way that had never been seen before, so we started with the basic concepts of pain, electronics, music and caffeine. Having recently escaped an engineering school, I drew an “insane” circuit diagram and then used a dense wash of freeze-dried coffee as base layer for color. We then sifted through tons of xerox copies (still the most punk-rock way of working that I know) of pictures from old medical books from the local library and started laying out the basic design. Rob re-rendered several pictures in charcoal and I scored the “psycho symphony” and we glued it together and gave it a final wash of hot coffee. (Get your mind out of the gutter, Mats.) For the lyric video I used the circuit diagram from the good old 8088 microprocessor. For those not in the know, it was IBM’s flagship chip in the 1980’s before the 286 (and successive x86 generations, then Pentium, etc) came along and changed everything. In Photoshop I made a gradient background matching the colors of the original composition and then using several custom “splatter” brushes I created several more darker layers to create a wash feel. After spreading these out in 3D space I then added an adjustment layer on top of everything with the Particle Playground plug-in to create the “floaty” bits. The hamburger backdrop during the chorus was taken in 2007 and has squished it’s way into the band artwork on several occasions (including the lyric video for The Indifference Engine) Add a fluid displace modifier and viola, instant gross. So here we are now 20 years after it’s inception, and I’m still proud of this little experiment that went oh-so-right. Thanks for listening, gang. Cheers!
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 18:33:04 +0000
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