 |
BY JOHN GRAHAM |
|
Front Line Assembly, Kevorkian Death Cycle Roseland Theater, 8 NW 6th Ave., 224-8499 9 pm Tuesday, Nov. 10 $12.50 advance The story of Front Line Assembly begins simply enough in 1986, when a man named Wilhelm Schroeder played keyboards in a then-unknown Canadian synthcore band called Skinny Puppy. The band wanted to tour; Schroeder's girlfriend wanted him at home. Puppy replaced Schroeder with Dwayne Goettel, so Schroeder renamed himself Bill Leeb and began recording his own oppressive electro music as Front Line Assembly. Leeb's career has expanded exponentially, growing more complicated with each sequenced synthesizer riff. What began as one man diddling with newfangled digital equipment in his apartment has grown to envelop a slew of side projects, involving such varied collaborators as angst-ridden art-rocker Blixa Bargeld (of Einstürzende Neubauten) and gauzy chanteuse Sarah McLachlan. And while the piercing dental-drill disco of Front Line Assembly is still Leeb's primary preoccupation and emotional outlet, one of his secondary projects--Delerium--is actually his most commercially successful. Its recent album Karma (Nettwerk), a delicate excursion into ethnic ambience featuring vocals from McLachlan and Dead Can Dance's Lisa Gerrard, is approaching sales of a quarter million. "The thing that started in my bedroom 10 years ago with me messing around with ambient music--who knew today that it would be so popular?" Leeb muses over the phone from Seattle. "Even Madonna did something similar on her last record." The surprise isn't just that Leeb, after years of underground cult status, has suddenly been shown the money. It's also that Delerium's vibrant, feminine airs are so contrary to the unrelenting darkness that shadows every Front Line Assembly song. Where Delerium is a sunny wine-and-cheese picnic, FLA is a post-apocalyptic meal of musty bread eaten in a rusting factory. On the liner notes for FLA's new double-CD, Re-Wind (Metropolis), for instance, you'll find the phrase "The world is a cesspool"--hardly a sentiment McLachlan's flowery Lilith fans would embrace. It's certainly a strange plot twist when an artist publicly defines himself as one character (in Leeb's case, a nihilistic cyberwarrior), then watches his less-intense alter ego usurp the starring role. But for Leeb, it not only makes sense, it's desirable. "I think most normal people have two sides," he says. "If I constantly tried to paint the walls black, I'd run out of paint. Delerium gives me a sense of balance. There's nothing better than, after writing a jackhammer song, writing a beautiful ambient one." The history of Front Line Assembly has had its share of contradictions, of course. In the beginning, even as Leeb charted his own course away from Skinny Puppy, his music contained more than a touch of Puppy's techno-Gothic melodrama. He later reunited with his former bandmates as Cyberaktif, where the similarity of the two acts became even more striking. Then there is Leeb's fascination with buying the "latest and greatest kind of gear," despite his synthetically mangled lyrics about the danger of being seduced by science, especially high-tech military hardware. Pulling an about-face is nothing new for FLA. In 1992, Leeb and colleague Rhys Fulber released Tactical Neural Implant, an entrancing electronic juggernaut many thought to be their finest to date. Ignoring the acclaim, the duo didn't try to refine the same songs and cash in on their next album, 1994's Millennium (Roadrunner). Instead, they altered their trademark sound, adding heavy-metal guitars to FLA's famous silicon foundation. Cyber purists who viewed the band as standard-bearers in industrial music's war against rock were outraged. Leeb shrugs off the criticism. "As an artist it's important to change," he says. "I was always interested in what was at the forefront; when the industrial and metal scenes collided, I thought it had a cool vibe. I had come as far as I could with collaging the music electronically. [I don't want] to get sick of doing the same old thing." That interest in expanding led him to dip his foot into other pools of sound, resulting in the Delerium and Cyberaktif projects, as well as other Leeb/Fulber outlets like Noise Unit and Intermix. Then, following another guitar-tarnished album, 1995's Hard Wired, Fulber left Front Line Assembly, Chris Peterson stepped in and the band shifted focus again. On FLAvour of the Weak (Metropolis), the six-strings are gone, vocals are minimized and the "electronica" element is maximized; it still bears the unmistakable Leeb stamp, yet fans are once again scratching their heads. It seems no one expects old dog Leeb to learn any new tricks. Not that he's worried. Front Line Assembly--and indeed all techno-industrial music--has had its critics all along, and the best thing one can do is ignore them and pursue the optimal personal course. "Some say, 'You'll water it down and people will get confused,'" says Leeb. "I disagree. I always want to be doing something different."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
