Infidel?/Castro! - The “theatrical noise”

In 2005, with “Bioentropic Damage Fractal”, they released one of the greatest masterpieces of recent years. Today, on hiatus while working on other projects, Infidel?/Castro! (George Korein and Colin Marston) continue to stir interest and curiosity among the most seasoned enthusiasts, dazzled by their incredible mix of ambient, electroacoustic collage, avant-metal, contemporary classical, avant-rock, IDM and much more. We reached George Korein by email, and had a long and fascinating “chat” with him.

So, George, want to tell us how the Infidel?/Castro! project came about?

Colin and I have been friends since we were 11 and have played together in various bands. At a certain point, we decided to start the Infidel?/Castro! project to experiment and explore, shut away just the two of us in a studio. We immediately realized that things clicked brilliantly between us and that our tastes were gradually converging. Working as a duo, among other things, made it easier to communicate and develop certain musical directions. Later on, we also came up with various ways of playing our material live.

What does Infidel?/Castro! mean?

Mystery?/Surprise!

Yes, crystal clear now! How would you define your music, and what do you want to express through it?

If you're looking for a stylistic label, one of my favorites is “theatrical noise”. We've always liked having a wide range of methods and a large archive of homemade sounds to develop musical forms; just as we've always loved using loosely narrative concepts to thematically unify these collages, presenting these abstractions both to the audience and to ourselves, all with a dash of metal to anchor our music more on the rock side than on that of purely experimental ventures. I've developed various concepts, using our music as a privileged vehicle. For example: the violence of hygiene (“The Violence of Hygiene”, on “Case Study In Bioentropy”), bioentropic damage fractal (“Bioentropic Damage Fractal”), or the (in)voluntary emotional response ((In)voluntary Emotional Response), as opposed to the involuntary physical response (the brackets, as you can see, mark all the differences).

From that point of view, we had something to feed people's thinking. But looking back today, a few years on, I think that, deep down, these concepts are secondary to the music and to what it actually ends up conveying to people; and I'd say that the first thing our music expresses, especially when it comes to the tracks written by Colin, is a nameless intensity... Many of the things Colin has written I've, in a sense, made my own, trying to achieve enough fluidity to align them with my own ideas... and I think I've done a good job of it. But that doesn't mean we've ever written a rock opera, with lyrics that help you follow a specific narrative arc... and I'm glad that's the case! I hope, in fact, that all the things we've left vague get, so to speak, reworked by listeners, and that they can trace their own personal narrative structure within each record...

How much weight does improvisation carry in your music? What kind of compositional method do you usually use?

Usually, through improvisation, we manage to pick out a lot of sounds, often working with just tiny fragments that act as “sound effects”. In any case, none of our tracks is entirely improvised. Live, we follow a sort of outline, though the finer nuances are all tied to the moment, to the fire of improvisation.

What kind of feelings are you interested in generating in your listeners?

We've always tried to make our listeners feel sensations we ourselves have gotten from other music: confusion, disorientation, fear, euphoria, a sense of quiet calm, but also excitement…

What kind of music do you like to listen to?

I've listened a lot to Genesis' 80s output, Prince, Elvis, Danzig, Watchtower, "Ghosts" by Nine Inch Nails, Merzbow, Darsombra, Tin Hat Trio, US Maple, some of the stuff Colin works on (Behold…The Arctopus, Krallice, Byla) and, of course, my own material. Then again, I obviously end up listening to whatever my girlfriend puts on too, like Jethro Tull or Betty Davis, Sparks or Magnetic Fields… She runs a really great radio show on WPRB 103.3 FM in Princeton, New Jersey. If you're interested, you can listen to it here.

Anyway, if I really had to pick one name out of all my favorite artists, I'd say Residents, no question! As for albums, right now I'd say "Oah" by David Torn's Splattercell, "Usi" by Už Jsme Doma, "The Royal Scam" by Steely Dan, "Pet Sounds" by the Beach Boys, "Obzen" by Meshuggah, "Stormcrowfleet" by Skepticism and "Introducing Lemon" by Cheer Accident. A while back, I also had fun putting together a chronological list of my musical obsessions, from age 5 up to today. If you're curious, you can find it here.

Ok. Let's talk about your records now…

"Infidelicacy" was a cd-r collecting an hour of music recorded over a couple of summers, plus a ten-minute track Colin put together in the spring. We were getting to grips with our first digital recordings and were having fun with all sorts of ideas, with no guiding concept, no clear direction, but a shared underlying mood. That material was less aggressive and had a certain techno appeal.

"Case Studies In Bioentropy", on the other hand, was our first official CD, with a more ambitious and violent sound. It's an album packed with cinematic samples, which I tried to fuse into a macro-structure of voices and lyrics, giving each of them a framework through which the voices and words could coagulate together with the sounds…

"Bioentropic Damage Fractal" is, for now, our latest record. It's an even more ambitious double album that follows in the wake of its predecessor, but without the cinematic samples. The first disc opens with destruction and ends in harmony; the second disc, instead, pushes both destruction and harmony to a higher, more extreme level.

I firmly believe "Bioentropic Damage Fractal" is one of the most original and important records of recent years. No record sounds like this one!

Well, thank you! I'm truly honored. Indeed, we tried to record something that would, one way or another, go beyond everything we'd had the chance to listen to over the years, despite our young age – for instance, at the time of "Case Study…" we were only 18! Even though we were aware that all the basic components had precedents, we tried to arrange everything so that the result would be as original as possible.

Your music is a mix of despair and hope… a kind of modern requiem for the decline of the world…

Despair and hope are emotions as common as they are powerful, and I believe that, rather than simply being subjected to them, we should first try to incorporate them into our varied explorations of intensity… People like to think that their generation will be the last one, that things will only get worse, and that judgment day is now at hand. For some, this happens because, as time goes by, they end up feeling overwhelmed by a sense of tragedy and by the intensity of days that go by ever faster. In others, nostalgia does nothing but diminish the value of the present in favor of the past, seen as a happy age lost forever. Then, for people who have children (or plan to have them), there are worries about the world their kids will have to grow up in. And so on. As for me, I'm not one of those who blame the modern age for all the problems it causes us. I'm a product of the modern age, and I like hygiene, heating, refrigeration, the ability to record music, telecommunications, computers, etc. – after all, how could you, right now, be asking me these questions about my music while sitting comfortably at home in Italy, while I'm here in the United States? If I had sailed off from here on a trireme, reciting poetry and playing a lute, you would never have heard Infidel?/Castro! and everything would have been different!

Hahahaha, that's true!

Then, of course, there are plenty of truly serious problems – problems that, over the last century, have shown themselves in all their devastating force (ecological and nuclear disasters, overpopulation, etc.)… but, to be honest, the real Evil is always the same: human cruelty. So there's nothing new under the sun. People need a moral evolution, they need to transcend the instincts… those instincts that drive them to portray one another as worms, robots and sex dolls…

So: humanity, get your act together!

Well, it does seem a bit tough… Anyway, hoping costs nothing. Let's focus now on the concept of “bioentropy”. I'd like you to comment on these words from Colin, taken from an old interview:

“The term “bioentropy” expresses the tendency of biological things to disintegrate in a horrible and disturbing way. It's something about the struggle between the organic (which lives, but only in order to dissolve) and the inorganic (which doesn't live, but is stable). That's why our sound – even in its more delicate moments! – is so destructive!”.

Colin's words are damn close to what I was thinking while we were recording our albums. Although I still think life is painful and complicated, that nature is “bizarre” and sometimes truly sick, and that, ultimately, hygiene represents a kind of violence that's often necessary – still, these days, I no longer think inorganic forms are completely stable, consistent and “reliable”. Far from it! Machines break down, houses rot, everything requires “maintenance”. Organic forms, on the other hand, carry out a sort of self-maintenance – say, if a house gets destroyed by a tree knocked down in a storm, that house sure as hell isn't going to regenerate itself! And yet, the house doesn't feel pain, either psychologically or emotionally. Right now, I'm focusing on other forms of this dualism: when to worry and when to let things go, where to draw the line on what we should be concerned about and what we need to tolerate, etc. How much to emotionally invest in things, when pain and pleasure need to be “felt”, and how much confusion we need to sink into… A lot of people seem to invest so much in what they do that they're almost always on the verge of a breakdown, crying over nothing, or, conversely, so pumped up that they're completely out of control and can't be taken seriously. Then there's a kind of ascetic ideal that tells us to let everything go, to not attach ourselves to anything, so as not to suffer; but that has little to do with being “human”, so I think it's a really pointless, meaningless exercise. You have to take care of the things that make you appreciate life, that keep you balanced with yourself and your responsibilities; but you have to be sure that care is genuine.

I often wonder whether I actually like the things I like… maybe even telling myself that, in the end, these are second-hand concerns that lead nowhere… And yet, people are quick to swear that “other people” don't really love the things they do. “Look at those sheep! They love whatever they're told to love!”

Oh, even though you didn't ask, the “damage fractal” has to do with the worsening of connections between things. You're dealing with something and suddenly you feel your attention toward it getting worse? That's the “damage fractal”.

From a strictly musical standpoint, what are the main differences between your albums?

“Infidelicacy” has some tracks that were very important for our growth. For instance, “The Tragedienne” (a hybrid of industrial, neoclassical and ambient music, ed.) was a real step forward for me, because I realized we'd moved past the usual modus operandi of the bands we played in back in high school, where it was all “here's a riff, here's another one!”. We'd found a way to portray moods and atmospheres. But while “Infidelicacy” is a collection of songs, “Case Study In Bioentropy” is a concept album with proper “sequences”. “Bioentropic Damage Fractal”, on the other hand (which, unlike its predecessor, doesn't use film samples), takes all the extremes of the two previous albums and pushes them to a higher level: the slow parts are slower, the fast parts are faster, the rough parts are rougher… It's also a longer record… Each album is more ambitious, intense and harsh than the one before it – and also better recorded.

Correct me if I'm wrong: it seems to me that the long track “The 49-Day Period Between Lives” (included on the split album of the same name shared with Friendly Bears, ed.) acts as a “bridge” between “Case Study…” and “Bioentropic Damage Fractal”. A synthesis of the two, so to speak…

Yes, that's exactly right!

Why were the two parts of “Bioentropic Damage Fractal” named “Cancer” and “Cancer; Decay”?

“Cancer” is about tissue that's lost control; “Decay” is about tissue that's about to be destroyed. So they can be seen as two sides of the same coin.

Ah, so I was right on the mark… When I listen to a track like “Intrusive Imagination”, I can't help thinking of Ligeti's music. It sounds to me like a bit of a revisiting of the “2001: A Space Odyssey” soundtrack… the “Jupiter And Beyond” section, to be precise. Listening to “bedridden” (literally: “confined to bed”, ed.), on the other hand, is a bit like being sick, stuck in bed, with nothing but the power of your own imagination…

Yeah, we like Ligeti, though I don't remember how often we actually listened to him. To be honest, though, I only listen to experimental music on rare occasions; but when you come across something really good, it leaves an impression that lasts. Usually I feed on pop music, while experimental music is more of an obscure delight, capable of creating an interesting, inspiring kind of memory. Obviously, there's stuff that sits right in the middle… and, most of the time, that's the best stuff!

As for “bedridden”, I'm glad it evokes the feeling of being confined to bed…

“Involuntary Physical Response” and “Cylindrical Bereavement Summarizing Its Orientations” are the best possible examples of your collage-like fury. In tracks like these, were you perhaps trying to evoke pretty much all of your musical influences (Berio, Xenakis, Penderecki, certainly Rock In Opposition, Neurosis, Foetus, Ruins, Behold…The Arctopus themselves, etc.)?

No, actually there wasn't a plan to systematically allude to a group of different, pre-existing influences. "Involuntary…" became a collage because I wanted to digitally simulate an orchestra. I was influenced by Penderecki at the time – I remember I was playing some Tetris-style video game while listening to Penderecki and thinking about a few things. "Cylindrical", on the other hand, became a collage for different reasons: I decided to build it entirely out of "mangled" fragments of "Damage Fractal Series II", which in turn contained "mangled" fragments of "Damage Fractal Series I", as well as material composed specifically for the occasion. Each series is meant to be a more disfigured version of the previous one. That's why the voice announcing "Damage Fractal Series I" (then II and III) sounds more distorted in "II" and unrecognizable in "III". And that's also why there's a title like "Cylindrical Bereavement Rearranging…bla-bla". It's an anagram – a collage of letters.

Penderecki, then. The traces of his music are extremely evident in "Biotrenopic Damage Fractal", especially on the second record. What struck you about this great master of contemporary music?

Penderecki introduced me to the techniques of sound masses and huge dissonant textures. Ligeti and Xenakis had probably already explored these things with greater complexity and in a different way, but, again, it's through Penderecki that I became aware of them. In his music, these techniques also have a simple, direct and dramatic quality that makes the approach more accessible and visceral, in a way that connects with what Infidel?/Castro! have always tried to do. It's probably precisely because of this "visceral simplicity" that his music has been imitated to score horror films: take, for example, the recent soundtrack to "There Will Be Blood" (released in Italy under the title "Il petroliere", ed.). And then, his most famous composition, "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" (1960, ed.), seems to be practically programmatic: it's like listening to sirens, screams, people fleeing, etc.

From what I know, Penderecki apparently chose the title only once the composition was finished: he listened to it and decided to give it a title that would evoke an extraordinarily tragic event. I don't know: do you think it would have been just as successful if the title had been "Composition for 52 Strings"?

Well, the title is certainly quite evocative…

Either way, Penderecki is, in any case, a "strong" example of how a title can strike the listener, also shaping their interpretation.

I quite agree with this, especially when I think of the titles of your own songs! Take, for example, "Temporarily Dissolving Into Plasma During A Moment To One's Self": a truly fantastic title for what is a great, "definitive" moment in your sonic journey. But tell me: were/are Infidel?/Castro! searching for some kind of redemption?

This is a really important track for me: it always gives me great emotions and it's always a pleasure to play it. Redemption? Well, in a sense, I'd say yes. When you play live, when you release a record, and everything turns out to be dissonant, distorted and destructive, it's nice to have something that, in the end, resolves the tensions. I could tell you what this track means to me, but time's running short…

Come on, George, just a little effort!…

Let's just say this instead: some of the most beautiful and intense experiences I've had were while daydreaming alone…

Yes, I get what you mean… And as for your concerts… what can you tell me?

It's not easy to play our music live, as you can imagine. For one of our tours, we hired Keith Abrams of Time Of Orchids, who was very skilled at recreating the impossible digital beats with his drumset, really taking our live act to a higher level.

It's been three years now since we've had any news from Infidel?/Castro! In the meantime, aren't you working on a new record? That would be really fantastic!

For the near future, there's nothing new. At the moment, Infidel?/Castro! is completely on hold. The last song we recorded, "Screed", will probably be released as part of some upcoming TenTones project. I had put together another concept – called Content Provider – for Infidel?/Castro!… but then I ended up releasing it as one of my own solo works.

Anyway, here are all the records released by me and Colin:

Colin Marston:

Dysrhythmia — Barriers and Passages

Dysrhythmia — Fractures (split w/ Rothko)

Krallice — s/t

Behold… the Arctopus — Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning

Behold… the Arctopus — Skullgrid

Byla — s/t

Byla/Jarboe — Viscera

Indricothere — s/t

George Korein:

George Korein — Memoirs of a Trilobite

George Korein — Too Many Days

George Korein — Another Corpse

George Korein — Content Provider

Naked Mall Rats — Somewhere on the Internet

We Are The Musk Brigade — Inebriate the Whole Sector

We Are The Musk Brigade — Sleep Got Vole

Lobe Stub — s/t (aka BREAK IT TO ME SLOWLY)

Art Jerks — Dysphemism Treadmill

Let's change subject. What's your opinion on the current rock scene?

Well, I wouldn't know. If we're talking about the usual top 40, well... I usually don't like any of it, but I don't care. As for so-called "indie-rock" or the "underground", it's pretty much the same thing. I know great musicians in Philadelphia and New York (and plenty of other places): I like seeing them live and, sometimes, collaborating with them – it makes me happy. But I'm a family man and I've got more important things to think about than trying to figure out why some music I don't like keeps getting more popular. A lot of people interested in this stuff seem to me to be a bit jealous too... sure, sometimes I am too, but here's the thing: I don't want to be like one of those weird old guys complaining that such-and-such famous band blah-blah... John Lennon's "Watching the Wheels" is a really great song.

If you're also curious about my opinion on the mp3 issue and the changes it's brought to the music industry... well, I think things are changing, yes, and for the better! Nowadays it's easier to record and release your own music, and I think that's really great! Sure, there's a huge amount of music out there and people are, in a way, thrown off by the sheer excess of music circulating on the internet, but ultimately nobody really minds. All of this pushes people to engage with what they like and why they like it, and if they have a passion for seeking out interesting music, it's all right there on the web. Some think this might cause existential crises for certain musicians and their fans, but I think it would be a real shame if people lost interest in music just because it's too available – and honestly, I don't think that will happen. I realize that for a lot of musicians it might be harder to make money than it used to be... and, on top of that, there's also the cost of fuel, which makes it harder to cover touring expenses.

Have you ever been to Italy?

Unfortunately, no! But one day I'll have to come and I know I'll have a great time!

Ok, George. It was a real pleasure talking to you. Until next time!

Thanks. Bye!

(28/07/2008)

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