Words by Arthur Durkee | Paul Lemos interview

Bleeding Beneath the Skin

an interview with Paul Lemos

by Arthur Durkee

Controlled Bleeding was making “industrial music” long before the term became fashionable (then overused). They have influenced practically everybody, from Ministry to Einstürzende Neubauten. Beginning over a decade ago, Controlled Bleeding developed a style that encompasses both experimental thrash and ambient music, dance beats and cultural subversion, all mixed together with an intensity that verges on violence. Now, founder and leader Paul Lemos has split off a new project, Skin Chamber. Both bands are signed to Third Mind Records, and have released new albums: as Skin Chamber (Paul Lemos and Chris Moriarity), Wound (Roadrunner/Third Mind Records); and as Controlled Bleeding (Lemos, Moriarity, and Joe Papa), Penetration (R/C Records/Third Mind Records). This music may not be for everyone–one of my art school-type friends calls it “challenging”–but for those of us who like their music loud and intense, no one does it better than Controlled Bleeding.

Longtime fans will be pleased with Penetration, as the musical/noise turf here covers the range of much of Controlled Bleeding’s career, including inarticulate screaming layered feedback (“Scrap Metal Part 3”), and the more danceable music from their tenure on Wax Trax (“Dead Man Reality,” several others). Wound by contrast contains a hard-edged, drum-and-guitar sound that blends Controlled Bleeding’s early screaming experiments with the raw aggression of the harsher forms of metal and thrash.

I talked to Paul Lemos in late June. Considering the dark, emotional power of his music, he was intelligent and affable, an articulate, likable interviewee. We started off talking about the distinction between Controlled Bleeding and Skin Chamber:

Why this new album with Controlled Bleeding, right after the Skin Chamber album came out? I had understood that you were tired of the dance-oriented music and were trying to do something different.

Well, I don’t know, you know. The Skin Chamber bio from Roadrunner had said that Controlled Bleeding was broken up. That was definitely misinformation. I think after Controlled Bleeding had left Wax Trax, we just had to reaffirm where we were going and what we were doing, so we took about a year break. And during that time Chris [Moriarity] and I developed Skin Chamber, which was an attempt to do something more organic and closer to the reason why we started working in the first place. Kind of a mechanism for venting certain frustrations and so forth. With the Skin Chamber project as kind of a dumping ground for a more negative thing, it really allows Controlled Bleeding to move in a lot of directions. And so it was really never our intention so much to just disband Controlled Bleeding and just go into another type of music, but rather that the two work in parallel.

So you’re going to continue both in the future?

As long as there’s some function to it, as long as both have a very definite purpose. If it becomes a job to maintain both bands, then one of them will collapse. But I think both of them have their very definite purpose for us. I mean, the next Controlled Bleeding record, after Penetration, I think will be quite different from the other things we’ve done. I think Penetration kind of marks the end of an era.

Meaning the dance rhythm era, or the synthesizer era?

I’m interested in dance music to a degree, but I’m not real interested in highly sequenced, computerized music. I think that it’s becoming kind of a cliché, and I don’t really want to follow it.

In some ways, you started it, and other people are now sort of getting onto it.

What we were doing back in 1983 or ‘84 was completely outside of what is considered industrial music now. I think the term is basically shot dead. To me it never had much to do with rhythm. We always liked doing rhythmic structured music, but for the longest time nobody ever heard it. They were songs more for ourselves. The Wax Trax thing was the first thing that made it public.

Are you planning to return to the more experimental, arrhythmic material, then?

Well, we do it. I think Controlled Bleeding sort of works on three tiers, as we have for about five years. Chris and I are involved in doing some real hard noise work still, and that will probably come out in Japan under our own names. Joe [Papa] and myself are involved in a more textural, almost a more “progressive” maybe, Mediaeval-sounding music, which we’re also pursuing. So, we work on a lot of different sublevels, and I think they all came together in Penetration, which makes it maybe a bit strange.

It’s been considered to be a compilation of everything you’ve done to this date, and then a little bit further.

Yeah, in a way it is a compilation because we didn’t sit down and make the record from point A to the end in the studio. A lot of it was ideas that were begun in my home studio over the course of that year break that we had taken after leaving Wax Trax. So it’s kind of a scrapbook of ideas.

I’m curious as to how the song “Awakened Beneath the Ground” turns up there as well as on the Golgotha CD.

Golgotha is something that really isn’t seen too much in the States, or even in Europe. I mean, it’s a very small-label kind of thing. That particular song seemed appropriate for a project of a bit larger nature. That was why we wanted to re-use it, just to make it a bit more public.

If it’s not a cliché to ask this, I’m curious as to what you’re thinking about when you’re doing this more–I don’t want to use the word ‘religious,’ but there’s a hymnlike or a Mediaeval organum, even operatic quality to some of this material. I’m curious where you’re coming from when you work in that vein.

Well, it’s not a conscious kind of process. I think that because the nature of our work has always been highly personal and directly involved with the emotional climate of a particular time period, that it just evolves the way it’s supposed to evolve at a certain point. We don’t sit down and pre-write these songs. I think the chemistry is different between Joe and myself, and we worked together on Golgotha–Chris wasn’t really involved in that. I think that chemistry maybe is a more spiritual one, whereas Chris and I worked on a lot of Penetration together.

As well as Skin Chamber, of course.

Yeah. Our relationship has always been a lot more volatile and just much more physically based. It’s a violent relationship in that way. I mean, we’re friends but even musically everything we do just comes out fairly aggressively. So I don’t know why the Christian tone to Golgotha. I don’t subscribe to any formal religion, nor does Joe, but I think that was a project that was kind of . . . I don’t know, looking into the whole image of Christ and the Crucifixion, which is to me a very powerful story, the Passion of Christ, whether I take it to heart or I don’t. I find it moving, and I find the symbols moving. They probably have some subconscious relevance.

It’s a tremendously powerful and important myth, particularly in our culture, whether or not one subscribes to the religion around it.

It is, it’s absolutely the most important myth. It fascinates me. I don’t know what I believe in, I don’t know if I believe any of it, but it has had some effect I think, on some level.

That’s why I wondered about the hymn-like qualities. I’ve heard in your lyrics, and I can hear in some of the musical arrangements, some things that really remind of the Medieval Catholic Church and its music. I wondered how your teaching job [as a Catholic high school English teacher] has affected the work you do as a musician, or do you keep them completely separate?

I try to keep them pretty much separate. It’s getting harder and harder to balance them, because of course teaching doesn’t really allow me to go on the road the way I’d like to. It restricts the time that I can put into touring, and sometimes recording. But as far as the experience, I do keep them pretty much separate. You know, students do find out that we’re involved in these different bands, and some of them have actually gone out and bought records and questioned me about it and so forth. But I really try and keep it very, very separate, because I find that it’s a real distraction to the work I do as a teacher.

What sort of music do you listen to for relaxation, or when you’re not working?

I really like modern classical music, and some early sacred music. Stuff like [Krystof] Penderecki, Luigi Nono, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt.

Do you know the new Henryk Gorecki album, the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” [Symphony No. 3, Nonesuch Records]?

Oh yeah. I like all of his work. Schnittke, his whole canon is great, I love that stuff. [György] Ligeti–I listen to a lot of that. As far as more popular music, I like My Bloody Valentine’s record, I like the last Public Enemy. And you know, I listen to a lot of just pure noise, like Merzbow and Boredoms, Hanna Terashi, the Syndicate. . . .

Do you ever listen to John Zorn or John Cage, music from that direction?

I like Zorn a lot. Cage I listened to for years and years when I was a kid. But Zorn–I always like Zorn’s stuff, I like Naked City and I like just about everything he does. We hope to work with Zorn on the next Skin Chamber record. We talked to him about the first one, but we just never got our schedules together. But I have tremendous respect for him.

Are there any other people you’re planning to work with in the future?

We’re looking at doing the next Skin Chamber, and we’re looking at co-producers. . . . It really all comes down to budget and finances and stuff like that. As far as actually collaborating with people, there’s a number of people we would like to work with. We just don’t have too much time for collaboration. Trying to do these two different projects properly and give ourselves to them, there’s not a lot of time for other stuff.

Any plans to tour in the near future?

Actually we were planning to tour this July with Controlled Bleeding, and everything was set on our side, but the agency in San Francisco fucked the whole thing up. So we’re going to try to take it out again nationally summer of next year, but we’ll be doing some isolated dates throughout the country at different points during the next five months.

Any Midwest dates?

I hope so. It depends on finances, on how many shows we can book within a certain time period. The problem for us playing live is that it always gets so volatile that things get trashed. We played the Palladium the other night, my knee now is all fucked up and equipment is damaged. And that’s probably just because we don’t play that frequently. When we play, it’s a little out of control.

So you tend to go all out rather than pacing yourself .

A lot of times. And Chris, he just gets too fucking hard to handle! It’s always difficult. But we’d like to tour America. We’ve toured Europe a number of times.

You have a big following over there. A number of your more experimental, different releases seem to come out on European labels. I’m thinking of Golgotha, obviously, but also Gag.

Gag, yeah, that was an Italian compilation of old, out-of-print stuff. A lot of them do come out there because in Europe there’s the possibility of issuing more obscure music. In America there’s not really that many labels that deal with this music. So in Europe, it’s been almost like a personal musical diary for us back from 1984 on really small labels, issuing what we were doing at the time. The records would sell a bit and then go out of print. So we put out a lot of records that way, all of them kind of impossible to find. That’s why we’ve done a couple of CD compilations, like the Gag CD [Cargo America] and Phlegm Bag Spattered [Dark Vinyl]. That’s a compilation of really, really early stuff. So these things that have been impossible to find on LP are surfacing on compilations. But a lot of them are still relatively obscure. I think that keeps the way clear for our progress in the States, because most labels in the States aren’t looking to do something on an aesthetic level, they’re looking at what they can sell.

That whole “bottom line” thing .

Yeah, partially. So for Third Mind and for Roadrunner, we are channeling our more accessible music there, only because it’s something that we would be doing anyway, whether it was released or not.

What about the emotional content in your pieces? You’ve said elsewhere that a lot what you do is a safety valve, or a way of relieving tension. When I hear the music, I can hear a tremendous emotional intensity. Have you philosophized about that at all?

I guess we philosophize about it–intellectualize it a bit–after the fact, when people ask where’s it coming from, what does it mean. We’ve worked very independently in a private home studio, so we haven’t had to deal with corporate interaction much, and thus the music always had a very clear-cut purpose. To me, it’s not only venting emotional violence, but any manner of things–depression, joy, whatever. But it’s always a venting place. Skin Chamber has taken up the place where a lot of the more negative emotional stuff goes. Still, Controlled Bleeding, Golgotha, and even a lot of the stuff on Penetration, was really just done out of need, when we had to get together and put something on tape. That was the place, and those were the songs that were developed. Again, most of it was done in my home studio. It’s going to be a very different situation when we have to work in another facility, on the clock, from the beginning to the end. That’s why I say the next Controlled Bleeding record is probably going to be very different than the past output, because we will do it from the beginning to the end in a full studio environment. I think we really have to do it that way. We did Skin Chamber that way, and it was very very hard to put it together for the first four days, which were basically wasted because it’s not the kind of music that you can just go in and begin.

You have to get psyched up?

Yeah. We did certain demos, and those demos came out of a lot of fucking anger–to reproduce that feels very artificial until you can get in touch with what’s making that music really develop. Otherwise, it’s not going to work. So that was a hard record to make. But yes, it’s always been an outlet for any kind of personal emotional feeling, whether it’s negative or positive. I think it’s always more interesting when it’s negative, when things are really tumultuous around us, when there’s a lot of emotional turmoil. I think stuff like Music from the Scourging Grounds and Golgotha were made in what were for me pretty dark periods of time, and maybe they reflect that.

Is there any artistic statement you’re dying top share with the world, or maybe that’s too pretentious?

I don’t make any particular artistic statement with this. I let people interpret it the way they want to. The only statement we’re making is one of a personal nature, and one of a kind of personal need. We do this because it’s really the driving force for us. It’s not a choice. The fact that the stuff is released–it exists for others to hear, but it would still be developing even if we didn’t have outlet for it in the public.

Interview ©1992 AP Durkee

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