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An Interview with Jason Novak of Acumen Nation and DJ? Acucrack
Posted: Sunday, July 06, 2008
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

In the modern age, the music industry is in a state of flux—some would even say perhaps a state of decline. With the advent of new technologies and faster connections speeds, the Internet has become the virtual reflection of the real world, creating a cyberspace-enhanced reality that has extended to the way people communicate with each other. When MP3s first emerged, it seemed like a cool new way for people to experience music, affording people endless possibilities for distribution, until the record industry realized the threat it represented to their monetary profits. While the debate continues to rage on as to whether or not digital downloads and file-sharing are hurting or helping music, CD sales are diminishing at an alarming rate. Some could see it as a passing of the torch to a new generation of media; after all, iPods and portable MP3 players are perhaps the highest selling products in this day and age. However, the controversy shows no sign of abating as underground musical artists struggle to adapt to these new technologies and achieve a widespread audience.

Once heroes of the mid '90s coldwave movement, Acumen Nation has joined the struggle and over the last few years has continued to build their fan base by any means necessary. Setting up their own record label in 2000, Cracknation, Jason Novak and his cohorts have played to numerous venues and audiences with their various projects, from the drum 'n' bass fury of DJ? Acucrack to the shoegazing psychedelia of Fawn to the bludgeoning machine rock of Acumen Nation, and even licensing their music to various media such as TV and video games. Like many bands of their era, they've faced the tribulations of record label politics and declining sales, all the while embracing new avenues of distribution such as iTunes. Midway through 2008, Cracknation is set to release several new items for the underground music market, proving that despite their misfortunes, Novak and company will continue. ReGen gets the inside word on the label's upcoming releases, as well as the reasons behind the recent change in Acumen Nation's lineup, their thoughts on working with the younger generation of musicians, the difficulties of touring, and the state of the current music industry and its effect on the development of underground music, while also touching on the band's history, going all the way back to the very beginning!

A good subject to start with would be about the video game soundtrack you've announced that you'll be doing.

Novak: The game is actually going to be called Unreal Saga, and it's kind of an arena fighter, or like an old-school classic game, not like Street Fighter, but kind of like one of those Ninja Turtles fighting games. It's a side-scrolling game in 3D, kind of like an old arcade game. Obviously, the graphics are much cooler, and it's got a real comic book slant to it. We put 17 new tracks together for the game, and some of them are sort of like remixes with familiar tracks that people might recognize that have totally been reconstituted. We're in negotiations to put a soundtrack out for it, so either we're going to end up doing it or another label will put it out. Either way, it will see the light once the game is out, and hopefully the game will be out by Christmas, and we can have the soundtrack ready to go at the same time.

You mention that people might recognize some elements of the tracks. How much of this soundtrack material is based on older material?

Novak: In order to get the contact moving, they agreed to allow it to be a non-exclusive deal and more of a licensing deal for the tracks, instead of full ownership. That way, if we ever wanted to bastardize our own music to make these tracks, then there wouldn't be any sort of issue with them owning. The more we worked on it, the more new stuff we added, and only someone with a really keen ear would be able to connect the dots and say, 'Hey, that sounds like the backing loop from so-and-so,' and hear that the guitars were sampled and edited and messed with. If you really listen to it, you might be able to piece it together, but for all intents and purposes, it's all new tracks.

KMFDM did something similar with their soundtrack to Spider-Man 2.

Novak: It's hard not to. Eric Powell's definitely done that with Primal. Just because I own all the publishing and the writing and the label ends up putting it out, we can repackage, reconstitute, remix, and do whatever we want to do with it to spread the music out as much as possible. Since we're not getting rich off of this and we're not selling it to people we don't agree with, I don't really have a problem with it. But hey, if we can put a record out, then we can strip the mixes down to instrumental versions that can get licensed out to those people that we do a lot of work with. We end up giving those to them, and then we can remix those tunes and put them out and license them to soundtracks or video games so that the music keeps finding new life.

Another bit of news is the new Fawn release that you're working on. You'd said that you couldn't devote time to Fawn because you had to 'put food on the table.' What's changed between then and now that you're now working on a new Fawn record?

Novak: Well, it wasn't so much that as it was that I'm not able to pursue it as an actual live functioning band that can go out and try to cut a slice of the pie or get an audience of its own. A couple of years ago, Dan Brill and a bassist and I got together to start to try to put a Fawn live lineup together to support the record and do more with it, but that was just where it became impossible, because there wasn't just physically enough time. Here we are juggling rehearsals for Acumen and doing Acucrack shows and trying to rehearse another band; there literally wasn't enough time in life to fit that in there. That was a disappointment, and I had to realize that I can't really put too much behind Fawn, because I can't do it the service of going out and touring and trying to get new fans that way. Acumen and Acucrack require so much attention that I thought, 'Well, let's put this away for a little while.' But there were still a lot of songs that I'd written and some new stuff that I was working on, so I'm definitely going to put out another record, but I don't think anyone will ever see Fawn live. That'll probably never happen. Actually, Dan and I and Brian Elza—who played guitar in Acumen at the time and Bridgelayer—we're putting a new project together that is instrumental math metal. It's not a situation where there's any sort of time and there's nothing to do as far as pushing it live, so there may come a time when we start playing shows and put out an EP. Then you might hear some Fawn material.

The one Fawn track on the Escape from Earth compilation sounded more electronic than the material on the Frozen EP. How is the new Fawn music going to go down that road, or is it?

Novak: I think it's going to be a little bit more experimental and have a little bit more of the aspect of that track. Right around the time I was putting the album together, I already had about a dozen tracks that I could've used, and that's where these tracks on this new record are actually tracks that we've recorded before. We'll end up obviously re-recording them and making them sound better, but as far as the actual writing of the music, I'd already had a good dozen songs that I could've slapped onto that original Fawn record. At the time, I had really gotten into a production sound as far as these really low-tuned warm guitars, and I wanted to explore that, so I ended up writing and producing in two weeks two or three of the songs on that record, like the opening track 'Cemetery' and two of the later tracks. You can tell that those are the really bombastic, slow, huge guitar tracks, and I was really feeling that at the time. So we put that record out and all was good, but your mind kind of ebbs and flows, and I think once we get talking about Artifacts, it's the same kind of thing. After the dust settles and I got back to looking at the Fawn stuff, I thought, 'Wow, some of this stuff that I turned my back on was awesome. I can't just let that wither away.' So that got me into a whole new mode of writing new Fawn material with a lot more loops and little synths. It will have a lot more breathing room and a more experimental feel.

You just mentioned the Artifacts release, and now you're about to release Artifacts II, which has material that you've said was originally performed as Acumen and intended for the debut Acucrack release. Considering that the material on the first Artifacts release was prototypical of Acumen's sound from the Eville and Territory period, how much of what's on Artifacts II informed the direction of Acumen and Acucrack?

Novak: If they were to be put out chronologically, they would be switched; these tracks are actually a step older than the Artifacts tracks. The original Artifacts was the bridge to what the current Acumen sound is, and you can definitely hear the elements coming together, the guitars coming in, more of a verse/chorus structure, and we were finding our style. These are the tracks that came out before those when most of my influences were the 12-inch WaxTrax! music that I was so addicted to a couple of years prior. I was on more of a linear songwriting path, where it was more for dance clubs and more for the sound at the time, where it wasn't so much about having a song structure or a chorus. It was about having a kick-ass beat and some great sounds that could make it through a five or six minute track that would kill the dance floor. These are really heavy on the 4/4 pounding kick drums, and there are a lot more pitch-shifted and distorted vocals, no guitars, and it'll be much more removed and less familiar to people than what you hear on Artifacts. You might snap your head and say, 'Who are these people again?' The production has still stood up. I think that was the reason that I've gotten into this, because as I go back and listen to some of this, and with a little bit of re-mastering and some EQ, these tracks stand up. They're heavy, and the sound quality isn't as good as you can get now, but at the time it was digital and we were using the Roland workstation. I just wanted to make sure that they're revisited and let people hear where we came from. I'm sure there are some people probably pissed off that we didn't stay in that direction.

It's interesting how some people have resisted the new directions you've taken with your music, even with regards to Artifacts.

Novak: I was pretty clear on the back of that record in the liner notes with the warning that it was not going to sound like what they were accustomed to, and I was very clear about what it would sound like. While this one does not have anything on the back of it, I'm hoping that people will see that from 1990-1994 was 15 years ago; of course it's not going to sound like the same thing. If somebody bought it and said, 'This is the worst music I've ever heard,' I'd happily give them their money back. But recently I've really been getting back involved with it and having a respect for this old sound that we all came from and how everything evolved so fast. With coldwave, the thing that we really became involved with was bringing in that sound of melody and that sound of guitars. This represents a time when I wasn't paying any attention to melody or guitars, and it was all about big heavy dance beats, like a lot of Revolting Cocks and Front 242. Hopefully, people before they check it out will know what they're getting into.

The last Acumen Nation record, Psycho the Rapist was perhaps one of your most varied records yet, and songs like 'Idle Lysergic Corpse' bear something of a resemblance to the older sound.

Novak: I think that record probably led me even further down the path into the past and got me interested in doing this Artifacts record again. After we put so much time, three years, into Anticore, and at the time, what we were listening to, what we were influenced by, and what we were going to enjoy playing was really as much metal and as much speed and time changes and whatever we could. That was making us happy at the time, and that came out in the writing. There have got to be tons of artists in what is probably a massive situation where you are forced to put out music that you're maybe not necessarily into performing or even writing at the time, because you're going to deny your identity. I think we're small enough and we've been around long enough that we can take a chance every now and again, but I think that everything comes around that you can tell it's coming from the same unit. Anticore exhausted us; we put so much into it and we ended up doing the least amount of touring that we've done for an album, ever. That's when Eliot decided it was time to move on, and I'd pretty much reached the end of my rope. It was around Christmas, the tank was empty, and I just shut myself in that studio and built both that and the Humanoids record at the same time over the period of a few months. Because I was all by myself and not working with live drummers all the time, and I didn't have other people's influences, I have to say it was much easier to reconnect with the style that people were a lot more familiar. That's why I think that the Psycho record is a lot closer to the old school sound that we developed years ago. It's definitely a meaner record, which is hilarious, because Anticore was about hatred of all these external things, and then Psycho comes along, and it's almost about hatred of internal things. Which one ends up winning? The internal wins.

You mentioned Eliot's departure from the band. Was it due to the poor reception of the Anticore record, or were there other circumstances involved?

Novak: He had had some personal situations occur here, and his family had all ended up in Arizona. It's no secret to anybody that we're not selling millions of records and nobody's really making a career out of this. The rest of the band is comfortable with that and has other things that we do here for money, and Acumen was becoming this thing that we'd all come together for now and again and have fun with, and he wanted more. He didn't have anything else here to keep him here other than that, and when it became clear that there wasn't even enough to sustain that, he said, 'Well, then there's nothing else that I'm here for, so I'm moving on.' We were all really sad, but we knew 100 percent that it was the best decision for him, and I couldn't offer him anything else. I couldn't say, 'Wait, there's this huge tour!' We tried so hard to get on that KMFDM/Combichrist tour, and that was our big ace in the hole. We really thought we could get that, because in our minds, we'd only done those few shows with KMFDM the year before when they came back from Europe. Originally, they were going to come home, regroup, and go back out to the rest of the country, and it was sort of an unspoken thing that we would maybe continue with them. But when another year had passed, and they decided to redo the tour as a whole different tour, it was like, 'Well, we're not going to have you do this one with us again.' It was another thing with Crash Records, because they had really led us to believe that they were going to hook us up with a lot of opportunities with the metal bands that they were working with, and we were really excited to get out and pursue that. Nothing worked out no matter what we tried. I can't tell you the number of times it was this close and 'Oh, it almost happened.' I can't believe it. I'd pretty much sworn off labels. Cracknation was a happy small home. We'd just rid ourselves of Underground, Inc. and any affiliations, and what do we do? We go right back in with the worst possible situation. I think that was because of the three years of putting the Anticore record together, knowing that it had a different sound, and wanting it to be taken care of, and Crash led us to believe that they would take care of that crossover. It was as if they said, 'You take care of your root fans and we'll make sure that the metalheads that want to hear this will be able to hear it.' That didn't happen, and we ended up getting a lot of negative reviews from the metalheads, which was fine because they could smell a rat. The way music works today, everybody's so genre-pigeonholed, and they were right; we weren't from a pure metal upbringing, which is the same problem that Acucrack has with the real hardcore drum 'n' bass community. They say, 'Wait a minute,' and then they dig a little deeper, and they say, 'Yup, sure enough, they used to be an industrial band.' They have a problem with that.

Scenesters.

Novak: Yup, exactly! The scenesters are the ones that you rely on, and they're the ones that keep things really active, as opposed to people who are more open-minded and listen to different kinds of music. It's not in their nature to go blogging and spreading the word, because they're not part of a scene. If they tried to jump on every genre that they're into, just a band or two here and there and talk about it...there's no reason for them to do that because they're not part of a group. With ReGen, you find yourself alone in the field. I mean, there's Side-Line, but there's no Industrial Nation, there's no Virus, and even Outburn used to be. We used to be covered in Outburn, and there was everything from Dieselboy to Skinny Puppy. Outburn gave us a big two-page spread with photos, but they had to pay the bills.

They went metal.

Novak: Yeah, and now they're probably having trouble even staying metal, because metal's not paying the bills, so they're covering bands like Atreyu and emo rock, and that's their focus. They still put reviews of us in there, and I'm really proud of that. We put an ad out with them a couple of months ago and I'm really happy with the fact that they still have a positive relationship with us, but if you look at the back cover, it's a Wal-Mart full page ad. You've got to think about half of the bands that they might want to cover in that magazine that can't even get in the door of Wal-Mart. But, you have to stay in business, and that's the most important thing, especially with everybody falling by the wayside these days in the music industry.

You'd stated once in another interview that there was some material you'd left off of Anticore because it didn't fit. Aside from the track 'The Wreck of Us' on the What the F**k? album, did any of that material form the basis of what was on Psycho the Rapist?

Novak: That interview might have taken place months before we completed the record, and there was a time when Anticore was only going to be about a dozen tracks, and we let it breathe for a little bit. I was listening to 'The Wreck of Us' the other day, and I was thinking to myself, 'Man, I wonder if more people would've heard this if we put it on Anticore. This is a pretty good song.' The only reason we relegated it to What the F**k? was because we wanted to have a unique track on that record, and because it was a lot lighter than the rest of the material. We ended up filling up the rest of Anticore to 15 songs, and there was one other track that was in contention, but that one did end up finding new life on the Psycho record. The rest of Psycho was written from scratch between December and March.

I noticed a little bit on Psycho the Rapist, but especially on Humanoids from the Deep, the use of similar samples from your earlier work, such as samples from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness, and it's like you've come full circle.

Novak: Yeah, exactly! I laughed about it and thought that it was kind of stupid, but I'm in this mode right now where I'm feeling 20 years younger, and this is where I'm at and these are the samples that I want to use. There were a few times when I hoped I wasn't recycling myself, and there was actually one sample that I'd totally forgotten I'd used. The intent was to not reuse actual vocal samples, and that's what I ended up doing. I'm definitely copping to purposefully sampling from the same movies, and there was the sample on the Humanoids record on 'Meninges,' and Sean Payne from Cyanotic said, 'You know, you already used that on 'Transhuman.'' And I said, 'No way!' And he plays it for me and I was like, 'Oh my god! I totally forgot about that, what an idiot I am. I should've been more on top of my game there.' But that's all right. If I had realized it, I would've yanked it, but again that Psycho record for me was about finding a way to marry the Anticore sound with the sound that we were most comfortable with from the mid '90s.

The song 'Idle Lysergic Corpse' is perhaps one of the most akin to older Acumen, and the song's initials are ILC. Was that intentional?

Novak: Possibly? [Laughs.]

You did a West Coast tour recently with Cyanotic, and your brother Ethan returned to the band to fill in the bass position. What was it like to have him back in the Acumen fold, and will he be a permanent fixture on future releases?

Novak: We had a great time, and it was fantastic to play with him again. He's such a good musician, and he was really instrumental in arranging the travel and the logistics of that nightmare tour. Over the years, he's gone out and done tech work for a lot of rather professional-level musicians, like that band that did that song 'Stacy's Mom.' He's worked with some fairly big artists where he was put in a position of responsibility to make sure that everything's taken care of and nothing gets left behind. Thank god he was still in the mode to be responsible, because it was nice to have someone who was almost like a semi-tour manager to make sure everything worked and nothing gets left behind and still be sober enough to get us to the next gig. Just because I'm not sure what we're going to do next or even what we're going to do next when it comes to playing live, I don't know if he'll be back.

Jamie Duffy was all but absent on Humanoids from the Deep and he has a small credit on Psycho the Rapist. What's his status now?

Novak: It's the same kind of deal where after things did not go the way we wanted after Anticore, Jamie immersed himself in his work. It's up to me to bring everybody in, and I chose to lock myself in the studio and do the work, and when it came time to invite others to be a part of it, I sent tracks out and said, 'Here we go, who wants to do it?' Dan Brill responded the most and he had a lot to do with the live drums on that record. It just wasn't a good time, I guess, and it didn't really work out for Jamie, which was fine with me because I wasn't relying on everybody, and was in fact doing it respectfully, but at the same time, I felt I didn't need anybody to help me with this. I know that might sound like I'm being a prick, but I didn't want to be put in a position where I'd need something from somebody else that wasn't going to be delivered and then the record gets held up. I made sure that if I don't get what I need from anybody that I can still make this a great record. I'm proud of that, and Jamie had other priorities at the time. After doing a lot of other projects, especially Anticore and the full-on band mode, it felt good to try something completely different and go back to being alone in a room and cranking it all out myself. If anybody had said, 'I want to be more a part of this,' the door was always open for people to come in and play some guitar, play some bass lines, play some samples, and the one who was consistently there knocking on the door was Dan Brill. That's why there are a lot of live drums on that record, and even though he was very cool about everything getting put through the machines, because we ended up re-sampling a lot of the stuff that he played and adding textures and using triggers so that it sounded very linear and robotic, there's a lot of live drumming on there that he can recognize.

Also regarding Jamie, you'd stated that part of the reason Lord of Cynics suffered sound-wise was because you didn't have Jamie's ears, especially when pertaining to the drum tracks. Now that it's a few years later and you've done more production work and you did Psycho the Rapist yourself, how would you say your skills as a producer have grown in that respect?

Novak: I think I'm a lot more confident now. Back then, I used to rely on Jamie and anybody else to take care of what I didn't know how to do. After that Cynics experience, I made sure to learn and to practice and hone my skills. I was building these exclusive licensing volumes for this licensing company, so I was doing a lot of music on the side and getting better with compression and EQ. I feel more confident about it and trying to produce more on my own.

You did produce the Cyanotic album, and since then, they've gone on tour with you, and Sean Payne appeared on Psycho the Rapist while including your music on the Gears Gone Wild compilation. What's it like to actually work with a member of the younger generation, and how has his style and his energy benefited you as a musician?

Novak: It's great to have somebody out there pimping you, and it's funny to remember Sean when he was a teenager, trying to talk to us after shows and to have been so consistent in staying in touch with us and worming his way in. I only say that because when it finally came time to hear his music, it was good. He deservedly wormed his way in, and it was fun to collaborate and work on stuff, because he does have good ideas. Over the past couple of years, he's definitely gotten a little more serious, and he's put out a couple of cool compilations, and he's definitely working a lot harder, whereas when we first met up with him, his reputation preceded him for being a little loose. I have to admit, on that tour, we kicked the shit out of him. He'll tell you; it was tour boot camp. Before that, he'd managed to go out with people that would take care of everything for him, and the way we built this tour was that we all had to travel in the same vehicle and everybody had to pull their weight, so there was a lot of boot camp action on that tour. I think he is definitely more solid because of it. I think he would back all of that up.

With the departure of one band mate, the virtual absence of another, the way things have panned out with the label, and the grim tone of the last two albums, especially with the last songs, 'Message from the Grave' on Anticore and 'Acumen Trepanation' on Psycho the Rapist, you're not trying to hint at the end of Acumen Nation, are you?

Novak: No, but I can tell after putting out this Artifacts release that if I had to end it, then I'd be cool with it, because it really would be the ultimate full circle. But as with anybody who does this, you're never going to hear of us going on a farewell tour or saying it's going to be the last record, because I'm fortunate to have been able to have built all of this and be able to write and produce music by myself. A full band is a band, and they require each other to make everything as a unit, so when they break up, that's it. You can't put that back together. Let's just say I decided to chill for a couple of years. I could get the bug and be right back in the studio putting something together, and I wouldn't need to call to get the band back together like the Blues Brothers. That would never stand in the way, so I'll never say that it's over. But doing this Artifacts release and realizing that some of the tracks that didn't make it were still a little too young… We were 20 years old, and this was 20 years ago, and there are some liner scans of stuff from way back then. It's funny, because I had to pull out some reel-to-reel tapes of masters for some of these tracks, and in the same box with them were journals from around the same time. I don't know man, talk about a spiritual experience of sitting in this room, smoking a little weed, putting on this reel-to-reel machine—and I had to buy a reel-to-reel machine on eBay to play these tracks—and to listen to these recordings from when you were 18 or 19 years old, and open up journals to the day you recorded this music and read what was going on in your life at the time... It was intense, man! 'Spiritual' is the best word I can use. There were some of these songs that were really goofy, and some of the older songs were really amateurish. And then you're reading these journal entries about girls that you were with at the time, or 'I'm going to this club this weekend, I'm so excited!' To be able to sit there and have that experience 20 years later, it definitely feels like I could shut the door and I'd be happy. But there are still some more ideas and things I want to do, so I'm sure more records will see the light of day. As soon as we find the right ability and situation, we'll definitely get back on tour again. I can't see myself not getting on stage again. It's difficult, though, because everybody's working so hard, and on these tours, nobody makes any money. The only reason we've been as fortunate as we are in Cracknation is because the only profits that come from it get dumped right back into what is essentially tour support. Once a year or twice a year if we're lucky, we can get out for a few weeks and visit some cities and play some shows and tap the bank. Then we'll put a record out and let that build up over the next few months or whatever, and then we open the bank up and hit the road again. If we had to pay everybody from the tour itself, we'd never be able to leave the house.

Practically the entire Cracknation catalog is now available on iTunes, and as CD sales are in a rapid state of decline, both in the underground music scene and in the mainstream, what are your thoughts on it? In other words, how do you feel Cracknation is adapting to the changes?

Novak: Until they tell me it's over, I'll still continue to press a few hundred CDs of everything. The difference between running a label and being an artist is that when you as an artist look for that, you get 15 percent off of the net of an album as opposed to the label. Because we are the label, so we keep every cent that comes in outside of working with certain distributors. There is an ability there to really downplay your expectations. I think the music industry has to say that one 10th of what we used to expect is what we should expect now. Can you live off of that? Can you rock off of one 10th? We're lucky, because we own all of it and since we find these other ways, like the licensing or the video games, it's because of that that we've stayed alive. Look around, and you see so few of the people we worked with a decade ago. Almost none of them are still involved in putting out records or anything. It's like a survival game now, and a lot of these labels right now, I don't even know how they're doing it. I feel like I'll always want to make a CD as something you can press and hold, but globally? Jesus Christ, do you think a kid in Japan is going to buy your CD? It's a shame that print magazines are going the same way. It's a sad thing, but you can either cry about it and quit, or figure out how you're going to stay in the game. I think it's a big part of sharing your music with other people, and if I had to be getting into it now, I'd be scared to death. But then again, that's because I've seen it from both angles. If you're growing up now, this is what you're coming into now, the MP3 culture; you just think of that as the new model for selling music. They're probably going to have to drag me kicking and screaming to not at least press a couple hundred CDs for those people who want to hold it and add it to their connection. The rest of it has to find a way for the global community to find your music. Our digital royalties trickle in, and there are a couple from Japan, a couple from the UK, and there are millions and millions of untapped people, if you can just find a way for them to just check you out. Think about how hard it is to sell 10,000 records as an artist and get a buck for each record, but think about how hard or how easy it might be to get 10,000 global downloads where you get that same dollar for the one song. Oh my god! Now that's a possibility; there's got to be a way to figure that out!