ADAM X: It's been pretty up and down, man, to be honest with you. I mean, I've done a bit of a US tour with Monolith and I just came up here to do the Canadian gigs. And there's been a couple of good ones and there's been some kinda slow ones, but I think it's a lot to do with the time of year right now, it's December, it's the first cold and in America especially people really get weird when it's cold out. Chicago was like the weather here in early December, and that's kind of abnormal. So some of the shows have been kinda weather related but then there's been some really good shows like LA, and Montreal was quite good. And there's been some decent ones, but you know, it's been the same for electronic music all across the board, whether it's techno, industrial, people just don't go out as much anymore, you know. I go to a lot of shows, I go out a lot in New York as well to all the parties and check out people. Turnouts everywhere have just been really really lax compared to what they were two, three, four years ago. I think everybody's just getting stuck in their computers and they do want to leave their house anymore.

INQ: Do you find that crowds are more shy even when they do come out? Like, is crowd participation at the same level as it used to be or are they more docile now?

ADAM X: Yeah, people seem a little more docile. It really depends, because Montreal was really good the other night, people were definitely into it. I think it comes down to if a venue is not really full people are less likely to dance, but when a venue is quite full people will definitely get into it.

INQ: You've done the last few shows with Terrorfakt, one of the hardest working acts in noise. What do you like about his style?

ADAM X: Ben's stuff is um, what I like about it is definitely the production and the hardness. As powernoise as it is, it's really clean distortion, like, the kick drums are not really distorted. They're really tight and punchy, like more in your face. You feel the music in your chest is what I like about his stuff a lot. It's very heavy, it's like very chest driven, hard, it leans a little bit more techno, a lot of it actually, to me. Coming from the techno scene I can definitely appreciate that. It gives him a unique sound that kinda sounds like nobody else in the scene, really.

INQ: I find he does really well live, I find he's a really enjoyable live act.

ADAM X: Yeah, Ben puts on quite a good live show. I was quite impressed with his show in Quebec City the other day. He's got some new stuff that he's been playing with on stage, and yeah, his show is definitely tight.

INQ: How have your fans reacted to the switch to your new darker, more industrial style?

ADAM X: Well, I've been doing this now 5 years, so I think people are starting to get used to it, and I'm starting to build up a bit of a fan base with people. The problem is, I have a lot of fans, and if they were all in one city I would have a couple thousand people coming out to see me. I haven't really broken into the industrial scene yet as far as people knowing who I am.
In the techno scene there's still a lot of people who like the minimal techno thing and they're not really shifting. They'll come out to see me play if there's nothing else going on, but they're still a little bit more loyal to the whole minimal techno thing, like, if somebody else is playing in the same city on the same night. So it's still a little bit weird. The people from the techno scene that like my stuff really like it. I get a lot of hits on email, MySpace, people coming up to me at gigs. I get a lot of really cool comments, pretty much daily, online and stuff like that, so it gives me the drive to do what I'm doing. I find a lot of the comments inspirational, and I think I did what I wanted to do in getting a lot of people into this kind of music, actually. I've definitely gotten a lot of people into it.

INQ: Well, fans of this music really appreciate that, because we could use a little more attention.

ADAM X: I'm trying, you know, that's been my number one goal is to really cross-breed both scenes. And not the raver scene, not the young kids, because if you came to New York and you saw the techno parties, I mean, everyone that goes to these parties are older adults. They're in their upper twenties, early thirties. Most of the people that are into techno, the actual underground techno scene, not trance music, people that listen to Jeff Mills, Ritchie Hawtin and all that type of stuff, and all the German compact minimal stuff, that's all an older crowd, man. A lot of those people have been into techno since the early nineties, and came from the industrial scene. You know, people like Jeff Mills was in Final Cut back in the late 80s; Ritchie Hawtin has roots in industrial music; he's done remixes for Laibach in the early 90's. So a lot of the people actually do know what's up with especially older EBM. What they don't know is that there's this whole powernoise scene, which to me in a way is techno because there's no vocals, there's no guitars in it. The precursor of a lot of this stuff to me is Aphex Twin, like the early Aphex Twin when it was hard and heavy.

INQ: What attracted you to industrial music?

ADAM X: The darkness. What happened was that I was getting a little bored of techno because everything was getting really stripped down and minimal and it was losing the dark, futuristic edge of the music. It wasn't prominent in the music anymore. I've always liked my music dark, from day one, I mean, from eight years old listening to Black Sabbath. I've always liked dark or futuristic music. As a kid I was into Kraftwerk when I was nine, ten years old. Techno, for me, just got too house music oriented and it was losing its edge.
I was getting into going back into 80s electronic music because there was a lot of stuff that I'd missed from the 80s. I was finding stuff and I was listening to Italo disco because I always found that type of music a little bit interesting. It was always very robotic and futuristic and there were always really god elements in this music but it was always a bit happy. And my friend was like, you know, I tried to tell you to listen to this industrial stuff like, seven years ago and you made fun of it and I'm telling you, you need to listen to some of this music. I wound up DJing a fetish party as well and met this chick, and she was into Skinny Puppy and all that and she was playing this music at this gig and I heard all the electronics. It was fully electronic, and I said "I didn't know this music was fully electronic. I thought there were guitars in this stuff!"
I guess techno was so good in the early 90s that I was kind of jaded to [industrial]. So when I discovered it, when it was introduced to me in 2000, it was from the old stuff first. Like Clock DVA, early Klinik, Front Line Assembly, like early 80s stuff. All my friends that were into techno were into that in the 80s. One of my main friends was a big DJ in New York, and yeah, that did it man, I flipped. And right during that time I started hearing stuff on Hymen as well, the powernoise stuff, and that was it. Because I like Klinik, and my friend was like, you should check out Sonar, it's the guy from Klinik, it's the new stuff. And it happened very quick and in the next year I had spent probably $5000 on music between old school vinyl and I built up a really sick record collection really quick.

INQ: What are some new electronic acts to keep an eye on?

ADAM X: Um, well, the way I look at it, there's not much new stuff that I'm hearing because for me, I'm still relatively new to the industrial thing. But in the techno scene I try very hard to push Terrorfakt, Monolith, Eric from all of his side projects like Sonar with Dirk Ivans, a lot of the Hymen stuff. To me, I try to push that as being the next stuff. I also like Jairus' stuff, the Ad.Ver.Sary, I like Pneumatic Detach, I like Manufactura, I like this band S.K.E.T. from Hands that I just saw play at Maschinenfest, really good new band. My boys from New York in Cervello Elettronico is really good, he's done some touring with Ben. My friend danPhysics who's a techno guy that does industrial stuff now, he does really good stuff. I'm still excited with this music because a lot of it is still kind of new to me.

INQ: The electronica scene always seems to be playing catch-up to what you're into. How do you stay on the cutting edge?

ADAM X: You know, that's a really good question. Actually that's one of the best questions I've ever gotten, because that's really been me from the beginning in 1990 when I got into music, I was always looking for something new. In the early years of techno the music was moving very quick; the styles were changing within six months. And then by '96 the scene started flatlining music wise. For me, some of my claim to fame in techno is my early hard core acid techno stuff that I was doing. 150 beats per minute distortion acid. Some of my early stuff is actually kind of like powernoise. It's all distortion on the 808's, 909's, same ideology. As soon as that started getting really big and all the people were doing it, I said "I don't want to do this anymore." I don't like to do what everybody else is doing, I want to come in and play my music and be different. I want to expand and take it further.
It's weird, with this whole industrial, EBM, techno fusion I'm doing, I think it's because I'm so aware of so much electronic music from having a shop for 15 years, that I can really stay in my own little world with what I'm doing because I'm really well rounded with music. A lot of people are usually pretty niche-oriented. I don't know that many people that like many styles of stuff. So that gives me an edge to make what I'm making, and if somebody copies what I'm doing I can jump. I'm not really worried about trying to stay ahead now. I think I'm creative enough now in my mind that I don't need to worry about it.

INQ: What drives you to be so prolific?

ADAM X: I guess it would just be expression, man. You know? I express myself through music. I have a lot of visions of stuff all the time. Not like I'm psychotic or anything, though. I like urban decay, I like futurism, I think very apocalyptically, and I guess it just comes out in the music. I used to write graffiti on trains and stuff in the 80s, I'm a pretty good graffiti artist; I'm very well known in the scene. I wouldn't consider myself an amazing graffiti artist; I can do really cool stuff, but outside of lettering I can't really do much else, so I can't really express myself and what I think through painting, so I guess I do it through music. I guess that's my drive. I sit down and I feel something and I just want to get it out.

INQ: That's cool. I had no idea you were a graffiti artist.

ADAM X: Yeah, I was very known on the graffiti circuit in the late 80s in New York City. In fact, in 1989, I was pretty much the most wanted graffiti artist in New York. On subways.

INQ: What hardware/software do you use to write your music?

ADAM X: Right now I'm using Ableton pretty much exclusively. And then I use VST plugins. I switched earlier this year, I went from an all-hardware setup to an all-software one. I like it. I feel like I can do anything I want now. I actually wonder why so many people, especially in the techno scene, do such unoriginal music. It's frustrating. This technology is so insane, like, why would you want to do records that sound like other people's records? I don't really understand it. I feel like I'm limitless now, with the computer. I've only been using it 8, 9 months and I feel that way.

INQ: Since shutting down your Sonic Groove store, you've said that record stores are at the end of an era, as online shopping seems to have taken over. How should artists market themselves, and how should we combat piracy?

ADAM X: [laughs] If I had the answer to that, we wouldn't be driving up here, we would be flying up here. I don't really know, man. I was talking about that today with Jairus [of Ad.Ver.Sary]. I don't think it can be combatted. I think we're fucked. I think that the fans of this music need to support us and come out to the shows. It's the least they can do for us as artists, is to come out and support us at the shows and buy some merchandise. Because we're fucked man, the artists, everybody's fucked. Nobody's making any money or making a living off this anymore. It's really scary. It becomes a moral issue, because there's nothing you can do [as an artist]. You can do what Sony tried to do and put these spyware things in CDs, but the person's still going to be able to run that out into some other kind of hardware drive and re-record it. There's no way around it, there's no coming back from this.
I feel that if somebody's a fan of my music, and they're not going to pay for my music, then they shouldn't be into my music. They should just not even download it, like I don't want them to listen to my music. They can download it to check it out, but you know, we're fucked, man. I lose inspiration from this. But I'm more frustrated that, at least more people could come out. That's what pisses me off, especially people in New York, they start bitching about coming out to a venue and paying 15, 20 bucks, and it's like, look, I bet you fucking download music, I bet you that ten years ago you were spending money on music. You could at least spend some money and come out to a fucking show, you know?

INQ: And what's fifteen bucks, really?

ADAM X: It's amazing, man. People amaze me.

INQ: Your website doesn't have any further live dates after tonight. Is it back home and working on new material after this?

ADAM X: Yes! Time for the new album. I was starting to work on it... I worked on two tracks, I took a little bit of a break and did a few dates in Europe. Then I came back and I was home for about three weeks and I worked on two really good tracks for the new album. And then I had Monolith come, and now I want to just go home, it's winter, I want to just hibernate and get some new album stuff done. I'm also working on a European live tour from March to April. I think I'm going to go for six to eight weeks. I have one gig pretty solid, and I have about four other ones that still have to get confirmed. So I'm hoping to do a bunch of shows there this summer.

INQ: What will we hear on the next album?

ADAM X: Well, the two new tracks I really like, man. It's getting better and better. Fate Unknown has about three or four years worth of work on it that was unreleased. I love that album, but I think on the next one you'll see a little bit more structure on it, more complexity, because I'm using the software now and I can get into more detail that the hardware stuff. The two new tracks that I did are really fucking detailed. You'll also see more powernoise; a little bit more distortion.

INQ: Good luck tonight, and thanks for coming to Ottawa. Any last thoughts you'd like to share?

ADAM X: I think I covered it when I said that if people like this music, they've got to come out to support the bands, even the bands they don't really know just to check them out. At least give the people that are working hard to make this music some respect. I mean, if you're going to download music, at least do that for us.

INQ: Yeah, because it is a lot of work.

ADAM X: Yeah, we're starting to get a little bit frustrated about it. You know? It's tough. It's tough.

INQ: Well, thanks!

ADAM X: Thank you!

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So a word to the wise: if Adam X finds out that you're downloading his music and not paying for it, he will probably come and kick your ass. After the interview, he got up on stage and proceeded to destroy the place. Adam X is a truly awesome performer, and if you ever get the opportunity to see him play, take it!
Right after interviewing Adam X, I interviewed Ben from Terrorfakt, who was also playing that night. Stay tuned, because I will post that interview as soon as I've transcribed it!

Interviewed Dec. 13, 2005, by Victor Couwenbergh.

By the way, there are a lot of different genres of electronica discussed in this article. If you'd like to know more about them, there's an absolutely amazing site here which covers the entire electronica scene with descriptions and audio samples of the different sub-genres. Don't be fooled by the cheesy intro, this site is phenomenal.

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