= excerpt 2 = So, What's the Deal with Non? An interview with Boyd Rice by Gary Numan

BF: In "Make Red," where is that chant from? It sounds like "Great, great, great, great..."

BOYD: They're saying, "Make red." "Make" and "red" are said at the same time.

BF: I see.

BOYD: Who was it? Who was it? Some nitwit was saying that it was really sexist because of the chanting, "rape, rape, rape, rape." People are looking under rocks to find monsters. I mean, people need that. They thrive on thinking that people are innately shit disturbers.

BF: After a while it sounded like "great" and "rake."

BOYD: It's sort of like a Rorschach test. It brings out whatever's in you. The person who's afraid of being raped hears "rape, rape, rape." Or maybe they secretly desire to be raped. Who knows?

BF: Is it just two loops going at the same time?

BOYD: It's a bunch of stuff going at the same time. Voices chanting going backwards in the background, then there's some sound I had and I used a noise gate to trigger that sound. It sounds like rocks banging together.

BF: Was the show at the Strand a Rorschach test? I thought it was going to be scary and important but it could have been more scary. It was more like a crappy haunted house.

BOYD: It fell apart. The whole thing fizzled as far as I was concerned. What we did in Japan was more what I wanted It seemed more disciplined, not necessarily scary. Again, certain people would be scared by it and others would see it as something else.

BF: What happened in Japan?

BOYD: They went crazy. They were very, very favorably taken with it.

BF: What were you trying to do at the Strand?

BOYD: We used an organ and a kettle drum, and there was a little bit with an oboe. We were trying to integrate noise into military or march music. Ceremonial sort of music. It didn't really come together at the Strand. It was haywire. There were a whole lot of ridiculous personal reasons involving people who were performing with me who had a lack of discipline. Fucked things up.

BF: There was a lot of face-slapping and grinding heels into people's toes.

BOYD: I should have gone there with a fucking whip and got those people into order.

. . .

BF: What's that fuzzed-out classical music in "Kingdom Come"?

BOYD: It's Wagner multi-tracked three times and played backward with the sounds of lions roaring and the coffin from Dark Shadows opening, the episode where they first let Barnabus Collins out of of his coffin.

. . .

BF: What's the deal with that song "Dark Shadow"?

BOYD: It was recorded by putting a mic inside a grand piano and then playing tapes through this huge speaker underneath the piano with the volume turned up so loud that the piano shook. It was vibrating before any sound started.

BF: What's the backward voice on "If Thou Wilt Remember"?

BOYD: That's the weirdest story in the entire world. Years before the recording of the Blood and Flame album, it must have been 1975 or something, I was listening to a tape of my own music while I was cleaning a mirror. Something happened to the tape. It jammed. All of a sudden the music that was coming out changed. It mutated into these backward voices, people laughing, church music. I don't know what happened. I thought I'd died or something.

BF: Maybe you'd taped over something.

BOYD: I'm still not sure what it was. I heard all these sounds and I didn't know what they were, where they were coming from, what was going on. I thought, "Maybe I'm going crazy." When I realized the tape was jamming, I rewound it, put it on play and it did the same thing it had done a few seconds before, so I got another tape, hooked up another tape deck and recorded it.

I always thought it sounded like backward voices. I figured if I'm ever in a recording studio, I should find out what that is. When I was in the studio for Blood and Flame, I used the tape for the intro. After we recorded it, we listened to it backward.

I said, "wouldn't it be funny if they really were human voices backward?" We laughed, turned on the tape and they were. It was these people singing at a funeral for a cockroach. I couldn't believe it. The only explanation I've been able to come up with is that it was recorded on the tape already, but there was nothing else prerecorded on there.

BF: Was the tape all wrinkled?

BOYD: Yeah, it was all screwed up.

BF: It'll do that. If stuff is recorded on the opposite side, it can come out backward and muffled.

Typed by Cheryl Vega 4-28-95