Dixon: What's going on? How are you today?

Jade: Pretty good. Just hanging out at home for a rare period of time.

Now you are going to be coming home from AFI tours and then you'll have to go back on the road to support your Blaqk Audio releases?

We just never give ourselves any time off. We do it to ourselves, what can you say.

I wanted to start by saying thank you for agreeing to talk with us.

Sure, thank you.

I have to say that I knew something was coming because I got a remix album it must have been about a year ago from AFI and it had 5 remixes of "Miss Murder" and there is a really good one by VNV Nation. So I had no idea that you guys would be releasing a full album but congratulations. I guess Cex Cells comes out today, are you excited about that?

Yeah this has actually been a long time coming. We started this band like 4 or 5 years ago although it was just kind of talk then and we didn't really write any music but we've been planning on doing this for years now and to finally see it be finished and be released is great.

Well good. And I wanted to know about your MySpace. You had the whole album online right up until today and then you dropped it back to 2 songs. It was great that you had the whole album but now people really have to go out and buy it. Was that the motivation?

Like I said this is pretty much a brand new band even though we have AFI and we have been a band for a long time so a lot of people don't know what Blaqk Audio is and they don't even know that it is like electronic music so we wanted to give them an idea of what the band was about and let them decide if they want to buy it or not.

Ok and so tell us about the process leading up to this. The songs are all really well done, great programming, they are incredibly catchy. First of all how many songs did you write and how do you decide which ones are going to make the album and which ones would not for you?

I have a lot of material. I started learning how to program about 7 or 8 years ago so I've been writing electronic music just as a hobby for years now. Only within the past 6 months to a year though did I really write all these songs. I think we recorded like 16 or 17 so we didn't go all out like AFI does and write tons and tons of songs. It was a pretty streamlined process so we didn't really have to get rid of a bunch of songs.

You knew going in which songs you would want to put more attention to because you basically had an idea of what songs are going to make it?

Not really because I wrote all the music and then emailed the songs to Davey and he would write all the vocal parts at home so it wasn't until we were in the studio recording the vocals that I heard the song completed for the first time. It was kind of cool like that though. Really the songs that we wanted to be on the record were decided at the last minute.

Now for all the gear heads including myself, your preferred programming instrument Q Base, Logic, Acid, Ableton Live?

I use a lot of stuff. Sometimes I'll sequence an entire song and for that I use a ton of different programs whether it be Reactor or Reason or Acid. I might do a little piece in Fruity Loops and I just use tons of software. I also use a bunch of hardware synthesizers and I have an MPC so I do old school beats that way. It really just depends on the mood. It's good to use different stuff and not just get stuck in one program.

What's your oldest piece of gear?

I have a really old Roland synthesizer that I got kind of right when I first started learning how to program.

Like an old 106?

Its not even like a vintage one. It's an XT60 so its like a workstation basically. I don't really have any vintage gear. Either people are really stoked and interested on getting vintage keyboards but I've never really been that into it.

With programs like Gigasampler and with the access to all the great sounds that come with Reactor and some of the other programs that you mentioned like Fruity Loops you really don't need to have all of those samples anymore you can get them almost anywhere so instead of lugging around a bunch of gear you can basically throw them all up on your Mac and carry that right?

Oh of course. Technology especially in music production has come so far so quickly that you can make an entire record on a laptop these days. You still have to know how to write songs and still have to be a songwriter but it just has made it so easy especially with electronic music.

I remember back in the days when the only way to write music on a computer was with an Atari 512.

I'm kind of lucky that I started after that because that would have probably still been pretty exciting back then to even be able to make any kind of music on a computer.

I suspect that most of the Depeche Modes and the New Orders started with the single sequencers like the Korg SQE1 and Yamaha series of sequencers that they would use but for the most part you were extremely limited and a lot of them didn't record a lot of midi note information so velocity and expression was not really a part of the way that you programmed back then.

They played those keyboards as an instrument and not just recording it into some kind of soft synth into your computer. I doubt that there was very much midi back then and they probably actually played those keyboards out of speakers and recorded them which is kind of cool to think how lo-fi and simple that was. But you listen to the sounds and they sound a little dated some of the programming and stuff but it still sounds so good.

Especially Joy Division and New Order and Depeche Mode. So let's talk about those influences and how your heroes and your influences made their way onto the albums and which band specifically would you like to pay a homage to?

Davey and I one of the reasons that we started Blaqk Audio is because we started listening to electronic music in the 80s. We listened to a lot of punk back then and we were young and into aggressive music but there was a lot of good industrial that was aggressive too like Ministry and we listened to Front 242 and poppier stuff like Sputnik and Depeche Mode. I just have always had a love of electronic music and then as electronic music kind of splintered off into all these sub genres there was a lot of great stuff going on with bands like VNV Nation. That whole movement really influenced us, that kind of dark trance music and a lot of the industrial stuff. There is so much good music out there and all of that to some degree in this genre has influenced Blaqk Audio.

So releasing an electronic album have you had in this increasingly metal market where did you know that you would be able to do that in this market and were you thinking to yourself we hope we don't alienate the die hard AFI fans and what was the pressure on you guys to stay away from that or were you just trying to stay true to the pursuit of your artistic impression?

We never really, even in AFI, tried to respond to anybody's pressure or expectations because that's just no way to make good music. Especially with something like Blaqk Audio its cool because this is just something that is a product of our love of electronic music and we were'nt trying to target anyone, we weren't trying to make this record for any type of person. It was just like we love electronic music and there are all these different genres of it so lets do a record and put it out and whoever is out there that enjoys it hopefully they will be into it and maybe we will turn some people on to electronic music that maybe hasn't been exposed to it so there was absolutely no pressure and that was one of the reasons why it was so fun and easy to make this record.

And the response has been tremendous. I know on MySpace you have been getting lots of comments from kids and also on YouTube there are a lot of kids that are making their own fan videos.

It's nice ad we've been getting radio play which is kind of weird because you don't really hear electronic music on alternative radio anymore. Bands like Depeche Mode used to be all over the radio so its kind of nice. We had no expectations going into this record and the response has just been pretty overwhelming.

That's another interesting point is that compared to a lot of other bands in this market place your music really stands out as being different. You and I know that its not different and the whole electronic genre know its not different but listening to it in mainstream alternative radio if there is such a thing as mainstream alternative radio it stand out quite a bit.

Definitely the way radio is right now like you said its different but if you are a fan of electronic music you can hear those influences in there. There's a lot of people that I think just decide they don't like electronic music having never really looked into it and hopefully there is so much good electronic music being made now and so much of it is underground especially in America and I would imagine in Canada too but if a lot of kids got exposed to this stuff I think they would really feel it.

So I got 2 questions that we ask everybody and the first is what would surprise people most to learn about Blaqk Audio?

Probably that we are actually good spellers and that our album title and our band name are misspelled but in fact I have spelling bee trophies at home.

Blaqk Audio the name, where did you guys get that from?

I actually came up with the name and we wanted to make dark electronic music and it seemed appropriate obviously Blaqk Audio. The Blaqk was a little twist on it and there is an Aphex Twins album called Drukqs and I thought that was kind of cool so that was kind of how that came up.

Is there any plans to have any videos made by Aphex Twin director Chris Cunningham?

Actually we just shot a video with Mark Webb who has done 5 AFI videos and he's a really big director. We didn't have any money but he was cool enough to do a Blaqk Audio video for us.

I would love to see you guys in a Chris Cunningham video.

"Windowlicker" is my favorite video of all time.

Yeah me too. All of his stuff is insane. So last question is which of the following experiences have you had: have you seen the face of God, have you had an alien encounter or have seen a ghost?

I have actually seen a ghost. I have a real life ghost story.

Can you say it in 30 seconds or less?

It really wouldn't do it justice but I have seen a ghost.

Well PunkTV.ca thanks you very much. I love the album and wish you the very best on it Jade.

Thank you very much and thanks for talking to me.

Interview by: Dixon Christie, PunkTV.ca
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