Astroturfing is the word of the week. My brother just told me that one of his model/starfucker friends just called him up to chortle over the word astroturfing. This tells me that it is officially part of the internet lexicon and everybody needs to know the expression.

The term is, like the term spam, derived from an actual product. AstroTurf is the leading brand of fake grass ground covering. Developed in 1964, AstroTurf has been a particular boon for major sports arenas in areas where real grass is not easily grown or cared for. AstroTurf takes their products very seriously and promises to provide whatever is needed for every possible sport:

” The broad range of AstroTurf products ensures that there will be a synthetic turf system engineered to meet the demands of your team’s sport. Whether it’s a field hockey team that prefers the hydrophilic properties of AstroTurf 12™, or a soccer team that prefers the high-density fiber of AstroTurf PureGrass®.

Whatever sport your team plays, there’s an AstroTurf product ready to take the field.”

Grass roots support used to be what you called it when a band or political candidate had a lot of people who believed in them, whether or not the record labels or political machine did. Astroturfing is the act of faking grass roots support.

For example, if you see a point being made over and over again on MySpace or LiveJournal or in forums, and the point is usually made by people who nobody knows in real life, who tell you nothing plausible about themselves, and who do not have known online nicks, then you are probably looking at astroturfing. This means that, when you see certain points made over and over again, by potential sock puppets presenting what they supposedly think in a bullet point sort of structured way, you are looking at astroturfing or fake grass roots support. It is my understanding that often dating sites and sites which sell music street team services to bands are the two types of organizations which most commonly set up fake profiles. Astroturfing is not the only function of a fake profile, but it is a favorite. A non-digital example of astroturfing would be when the news media found out that the enthusiastic fans waiting in line to buy various products when they first came on sale . . . were not really enthusiastic fans. Many bands, when either touring or showcasing, hire good-looking girls to come cheer in the front row, but traditionally one at least had to find real live good-looking girls to be willing to act like they supported the band. Now they can be wholly fictional.

Astroturfing has become popular for three primary reasons. Firstly, the current younger demographics have been bombarded with traditional advertisements for so many years that a certain immunity to them has resulted, forcing marketers to be creative. Secondly, because the internet was initially (ROFL) supposed to be a noncommercial environment, a lot of marketers came up with innovative (and icky) ways to circumvent people’s resistance to blatant and honest commercial presentation. Thirdly, artists and politicians who have actual grass roots support are very hard for the corporate world to entirely control, so corporations prefer popularizing something fake through astroturfing to having to deal with individuals who have personal power.

Now everyone go use the term astroturfing in a sentence this week.

So right now FUSE is playing a block of Nelly videos. I find Nelly ridiculously hot. Hot like sexy, not hot like kindling. I’m not even sure if I like his music, but I certainly enjoy his videos. They’ve got productions values! (Bonus cool points to anyone who gets the movie reference there.)

So I was sitting there, letting the purple hair dye set in my hair, watching the Hot In Here video, and I suddenly realized that at least part of the video was shot inside a particular nightclub on Hollywood Blvd. Specifically, it was shot inside the Basque nightclub a couple blocks from me which burned down a day ago. Holy firemen of irony, Batman!

I was all trying to go to sleep at like six in the morning and I couldn’t figure out WTF was up with all the helicopters. I mean, my neighborhood has been a little weird lately, but this was just ridiculous. Turned out they were all the news copters shooting the fire and the literally two hundred and ten firemen and countless arson investigators and other officials dealing with the fire. Apparently, the building’s core was super old and had like poisonous resins or something on some of the burning wood. Not the best air quality where I live in Los Angeles for the past day.

But I really think the copters should have been blasting Nelly singing Hot In Here while they flew over my place. That would have totally made it all okay.

I handed Gene Simmons his laundry once. This was more than ten years ago, so my memory is a bit murky, but, as I recall, I may have both handed him his clean laundry and picked up his dirty laundry to run back to the stadium. It was one of my last gigs as a stagehand. I was a runner. A runner is someone who will work for stagehand wages but has a working and ideally presentable car. At the time, I had already mostly transitioned into doing contract design work, corporate presentations and that sort of thing which paid better. My car actually was not terribly presentable, but some of the staff for the KISS tour recalled a nicer-looking (but less reliable) car I had owned at the time of an earlier gig and they liked me. I took the job because they had specifically requested if “the girl with the kinky zines” was still available. Plus working at a rock stadium was generally pretty sociable and fun, especially at a job which, unlike many I’d done there, was unlikely to cause injury.

I was never a member of the KISS Army or anything and my parents felt the KISS logo was unacceptable Nazi regalia and boys who wanted me to like KISS (and them) had always played me “Beth”. I guess guys always think the chick will like the power ballad better than the rocker, but it always struck me as really ill-conceived to try to seduce a girl with a song about blowing off your girlfriend. (Talk about “Lick My Love Pump” being in the saddest key!) I did think KISS had some fairly listenable music, but I was not crazy familiar with them either.

So, when my runner job afforded me the opportunity to watch part of a KISS concert, I didn’t have a ton of expectations, except that I’d vaguely thought they wore their makeup different. I missed the whole trauma the hardcore KISS fans endured when the band went from monster makeup to hair metal makeup. They are probably the only band in the history of the universe to get less pussy after donning hair metal makeup than they got without it.

Regardless, the thing which struck me most when I worked for KISS was that there were ridiculously hot unfamiliar girls at the show. Like super hot and super into the band. And, at the time, I was at least minimally acquainted with a pretty high percentage of the hot sluts in the DC/NoVa/Baltimore area. So it was surprising to have so many incredibly hot metal chicks at a KISS concert and not recognize any of them from other events I’d been at. I commented on the anomaly at the time to everyone I mentioned the show to, but I didn’t understand what the likely reason was that there were such hot girls there who I’d never seen at shows by Guns N’ Roses, Skid Row, Poison, Aerosmith, Warrant, Kix, Child’s Play, and countless good-looking national and local bands in related genres.

I joked at the time that the band must bring the girls with them or something. This went way beyond just what a band bringing groupies from the last city would entail, but it didn’t occur to me that it really would be beneficial for a band like KISS to in fact hire a hottie crew. A lot of their fanbase was homophobic, but there were persistent rumors that their lead singer Paul Stanley was homosexual or bisexual and Gene Simmons had this demon fuckmonster persona where he lived out fans’ male adolescent fantasies, so, from a PR perspective, it really would have made sense for them to cast some amazingly hot women as enthusiastic fans and pay them to come on tour at cheer them on. I mean, sports teams have cheerleaders and that is kind of the same benefit. The only difference is really that cheerleaders have uniforms and everybody knows what their roles are, but hired rock fans are kind of more disingenuous. The first time I photographed someone who made rent pretending to enjoy The Rolling Stones in concert, it was like I found out Santa Claus was a lie. Actually my parents never lied to me about Santa Claus, so I think I got that childhood trauma at a later age, when I realized that rock n’ roll was kinda dishonest.

The music industry has a long history of putting fake publicity out there. The habit greatly pre-dates rock and roll. It is ironic that the internet has put such a damper on music sales. On the one hand, the web has made it so much easier to disseminate dishonest presentations of self, but it has also made it easier to steal the music industry’s primary product. So, the industry is taking a huge hit to the wallet at the same time that its PR machine has destroyed any trust music fans might have had. Their disingenuous behavior makes it hard for anyone to feel much sympathy for the record industry.

It seems obvious to a teenager that a squeaky clean band might have a dark secret life, but it is less obvious that someone might be drinking apple juice out of a Jack Daniels bottle on stage. At this point, I pretty much disbelieve anything stated more than twice in any press release. I figure whatever they are trying to sell me is probably a lie. I used to listen to music every day and base large portions of my life around music and music-related events. But I’ve lost my faith.

So a site calling itself Gene’s Secret launched this week with a seven or so minute video purporting to be of Gene Simmons fucking some blonde. A couple of clips from the video have also been circulating the web and blog empire Gawker received a cease and desist from Gene Simmons’ attorneys for running them. If you care, the sex is not particularly inspired or emotional and the blonde actively avoids kissing the KISS bassist and they are apparently doing it to the dulcet tones of Steve Perry. Gawker feels the clips are sufficiently newsworthy as to not require them to comply with the C&D. Now I could go off about celeb sex tapes and Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee and Fred Durst and why these types of videos tend to have unappetizing sex and why our Puritan society refers to anyone in one as B list and what is wrong with a society which invades people’s privacy like this. But I’m not going to because I, perhaps cynically, believe that the whole thing is an orchestrated publicity stunt. I have no faith that this is a real stolen video or that the subjects did not know they were being recorded or that any of what is being presented is remotely as real as WWF.

At first glance, some people felt the Gene’s Secret Gene Simmons sex tape was a hoax and utilized a lookalike. I mean, there are an awful lot of KISS cover bands, so I can understand how people would believe it would not be hard to find a Gene Simmons demon lookalike. Through the Manatt law firm, Gene Simmons confirmed the authenticity of the sex tape but denied that anyone but Gene Simmons’ Allied Industries corporation should be able to profit from it. Nonetheless, the video is still live on the Gene’s Secret site, which one would assume would be the first target for a C&D. If this reminds altporn fans of when a site called SuicideGirls unsuccessfully pretended it was not really them licensing their content when they decided to resell unretouched versions of photosets they had promised models they would not resell . . . well, it reminds me of that little fiasco too. (Full disclosure: At the suggestion of SuicideGirls head honcho Sean Suhl, Blue Blood has previously consulted with the law firm of Manatt, Phelps, & Phillips.) Both scenarios feature a lawyer letter which purports to be trying to stop the distribution of the content, while simultaneously giving the content authenticity. Of course, this is the internet, so Gawker promptly posted the C&D on their tech industry blog Valleywag under the heading “Gene Simmons lawyer confirms sex tape’s authenticity“. While this may prove that the man in the video is in fact the tongue-wielder from KISS, it doesn’t prove that the whole thing is not a hoax.

The Gene’s Secret site features the following copy:

“This isn’t Shannon, this isn’t the same Family Jewels that you can catch on late-night cable. This is Gene giving you his best on screen performance yet! Find out all the benefits of being the spokesperson for a the latest energy drink, Frank’s Energy. Although it looks like Gene would rather gulp done one of Frank’s Energy Girls! . . . What is Gene’s Secret? Actually, it’s a WHO, and she is a hot little Austrian babe, named Elsa. She is a model, and one of the Frank’s Engery Drink Girls, a brand which Gene endorses (apparently to fuel his sex drive.) Elsa and Gene party like rockstars, and we have it all here, EXCLUSIVELY on GenesSecret.com.”

Now, I’ve never heard of this energy drink before, but I’m guessing a lot of people, who never heard of it before, have now heard of it. Most of the copy on the membership site tour is about how Gene has a reality show called Family Jewels and he uses this beverage. Celebrity sex tape site tours usually have a lot more text about how you just have to see this video and you should sign up now now NOW! This tour seems less interested in making sales and more interested in telling everyone about projects Gene Simmons gets paid on. Gene Simmons keeps his shirt on during the video and most people prefer to get naked for sex or at least don’t pay attention to the clothing they have on, but a video of an older guy having sex is less embarrassing if he is wearing a smoothly adjusted T-shirt for the whole thing. A publication called AVN, which is primarily about mainstream Valley porn video, puts on an award show for pornstars every January. Last year, Gene Simmons was a presenter at the AVN awards show and AVN was apparently the first to break the news about the Gene’s Secret celebrity sex tape. Coincidence or evidence of the occult? You be the judge.

When something like a celeb sex vid scandal happens, it is hard to parse out the truth, so people tend to partly believe the whole thing is fake and partly believe the whole thing is real. So many things like this have been presented to people in the Digital Age that most people carry constant cognitive dissonance around in their heads 24/7/365 now. No wonder prescriptions for antidepressants are so common. Cognitive dissonance is painful. It is bad for society when people suffer from constantly having mutually exclusive ideas in their heads. Aside from the mental health costs, when people are used to the puzzle pieces in their brain not fitting, then they become much less able to make decisions, less able to run their own lives well, less able to vote for candidates who hold their values, less able to form lasting relationships. People may think they are just doing internet marketing, but they are causing real world damage.

I wish I believed that hot chicks, who can really strut, just want to rock and roll all night. I wish I believed that some callous big titty whore tricked a genuinely promiscuous and wild rock star into starring in his own porn video, blackmailed him, and then cashed in anyway. I wish I believed that Gene Simmons was a victim here. That might all be true, but the music industry has cried wolf too many times for me to believe any of it. They’ve put too many snake oil salesmen behind the pulpit. I wish I believed that anything in music culture was real now. Viral marketing has destroyed any trust music fans, or people who would otherwise have been music fans, might have in music or musicians.

Viral marketing might get the word out, but it has destroyed my faith.

Since a bunch of folks really enjoyed the fun Hex Hollywood gallery we recently released, I thought it would be enjoyable to catch up with Xian and give everybody a bit of insight into the mind and motivations of the creative force behind these events. Xian is dedicated and involved in the Los Angeles underground scene as an active and energetic promoter, DJ, coder, community host, and much more. In addition to the Hex events, she is also involved in or responsible for an impressive array of cool clubs and projects, including Malediction Society, Disko Nekro, The Darkroom, Perversion, and even the monthly goth industrial deathrock skating excursion that is Wumpskate. And when there is some spare time, she even runs the LADead.com community website for the Los Angeles underground scene.

She took some time out to share her thoughts and perspective on Los Angeles club life with us.

1. Given just how many clubs and events you are involved with, we get the impression that you don’t sleep much. Tell us what an average week schedule is like for Xian?

Ugh, this could get complicated, so I’ll try to keep it simple:

Summed up, I am DJing 3-4 nights a week these days, meanwhile holding down a full time web development job (40-50 hours). Non club nights I clock in about 2-3 hours of web work, promotions, and graphics design, and during the day on weekends this jumps to about 4-5 hours. Unless there is a special event coming up, then it jumps up significantly. As far as sleep goes, I probably get anywhere from 4-5 hours of sleep on week nights and 7-8 hours of sleep on weekend nights.

A bit crazy I realize, but I got more tired of sleeping my life away than actually being tired (chronic fatigue). And there’s this pressing sense that I am running out of time to do the things I want to do and make something of myself.

2. What do you find most rewarding for keeping such a hectic schedule?

I could say something cliche like personal satisfaction, or that sense of vindication for overcoming odds and obstacles. Or that I like to keep busy so I don’t have much time to dwell, or that I like to give people with talents and wares a place to showcase them. And it would all true. But at the heart of it all I am chasing a dragon.

I firmly believe that our experiences in life are precious, particularly those key moments where one feels truly and completely alive. For myself, I have discovered that I am particularly fond of this moment in the nightclubs and events. It is the kind of experience that I can involve other people in, and enable them towards. And in my own personal philosophy, because this experience requires the presence and perception of other people.

As a DJ, it is that moment of establishing resonance with the dancers, and the story that unfolds. As a dancer, it is the experience of getting lost entirely in music, and being allowed to move how you really feel. And as a promoter, it is that feeling of having taken a concept and breathed life into it, paired with the audience that partakes of it. These are all addicting, cathartic, and simply without compare for me. Each moment is rewarding.

3. You have been doing all this work for a while now, what are some of your goals with it? What future would you like to see?

WORLD DOMINATION!!! Actually, I have no idea.

My sense of time is fairly awful, and so traditionally I have just kept moving forward and would stop and consider opportunities as they pop up. The HEX HOLLYWOOD events, on the otherhand, force me to think about the concept, plan, and execution months in advance. Which pretty much taps my mana until the round is over.

As far as the future is concerned, I would just really like to see the darker underground scenes and communities continue to evolve, grow, and thrive. We have become one of the oldest of the (post)modern subcultural legacies, and we’re perhaps one of the most internally diverse. People from all walks of life, for all sorts of reasons come to the clubs, read the literature, listen to the music, and participate in the scenes and communities. This is something I find endlessly fascinating.

4. What are the top aspects of of the sort of spooky goth-industrial darkwave punk rock nightlife scene that you would like to change?

It is my opinion that the clubs contribute heavily to the longevity of these scenes. We bring the people together, encourage the aesthetic, and showcase the music and goods. So the biggest problem that I see is that so few of the involved people are sincerely committed to the concept. DJs and promoters looking for fame, money, and popularity are a dime a dozen, and they inevitably are the main source of drama and jaded patrons. Jaded patrons who in turn are unreliable in situations where a dozen people could make or break a club,

So the obvious answer for me is that I would just like to see more people get involved out of a love of the scene, the experience, and the music. Sincerity and dedication is where quality begins…along with the obvious prerequisite business competency (see, not a total idealist). Here in Los Angeles alone there has already been four “eras” where our scene has thrived, that I am aware of, and we are on our way to a fifth. Elsewhere, I get the impression that a lot of people are still waiting on someone else to do something. Which is too bad. Apathy begets inaction, and inaction depreciates everyone’s life.

5. Given how notoriously political the Los Angeles club scene has a reputation for being, how do you manage to get along with everybody?

Heh, I don’t.

My biggest personal problem has always been that I have about as much tact as a sledgehammer, and no qualms about telling people what I think of them or what they are doing when set off. Normally I am quite aloof, so the contrast just makes it all the more jarring. So having worked with over half the DJs and promoters, and a good number of the fetish performers here in Los Angeles, I have been privy to a fair amount of arguments and falling outs.

More often than not it is a behaviour or circumstance that I get upset over, or them with me, but most are quickly resolved. I am just not one to condemn a person as an entire whole because of a little part, and I get the impression that this is a relief to people. Individuals who walk around pinning everyone’s faults and fuck-ups on them will obviously have issues with getting along with them. People change and grow and mature. So should your concept of them.

I only met Rozz Williams once.

A bunch of the Blue Blood crew were in Los Angeles, celebrating the release of Blue Blood #5. That was the first full color issue of the magazine. I’d used a comic book printer who did high quality art repro and had no problem printing depictions of nude women. Heck, they actually also printed tons of publications involving sexualized eviscerations of women. (Yes, we were doing cross-promo with Glenn Danzig’s extreme Verotik at the time and he used the same printer.)

But the printer had had some concerns about Blue Blood’s content. First, they were very concerned that there was bestiality. I was like, WTF? They are holding up printing my magazine because they are concerned about the bestiality? Where do they think I have bestiality? Then I realized that I had written a fiction piece about the drummer in a dykey industrial band who gets with a werewolf. I was proud of the story and it was illustrated with elegant photographs by the famous Gunter Blum. I was thrilled that someone as huge as Gunter Blum wanted to be in Blue Blood. I really didn’t want to remove the werewolf piece and I really wanted to get my magazine printed. So I call the printer ready to do battle.

It turned out that the werewolf erotic fiction was not the problem at all. NOFX had sent Blue Blood a blow-up sheep. At the time, NOFX was unpopular with a lot of music journalists because they didn’t like to do interviews. I thought sending me a Love Ewe (get it?) was a billion times cooler than any interview could be, so I thought they were totally cool. Forrest Black shot me using a strap-on on the NOFX Love Ewe and we ran a picture of it, as part of a piece on NOFX, in Blue Blood’s bits and pieces entertainment section. Just looking at the film, the printer had thought this was actual bestiality. After the magazine was printed and shipped, the printer told me they were very concerned that I had male nudity in the magazine. That was undeniable and not about to change, so I only printed one issue there.

The issue came out, despite the printer’s reservations, and it looked great. So the Blue Blood crew headed out to Los Angeles to celebrate. On Rozz Williams night at the Probe on Highland in Hollywood, California, we were all feeling really good about having gotten the magazine hot off the presses, against so many obstacles. We were meeting so many interesting new people. We were thrilled to be among our own, among people who wouldn’t be pussies about something as funny as fucking what was essentially a punk rock balloon animal.

I went over to where Rozz Williams was holding court and gave him a copy of the new issue. He was shy and sweet. He thanked me. He told me he had enjoyed the earlier issues and did not have this one yet. Maybe he was just being polite, but the thing which sticks in my mind is that he took a moment to be kind. But, when I walked around the club, there were all these people saying the most terrible things about Rozz Williams. I don’t mean they were criticizing him for being a little too into Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer or something. I mean, people were just tearing the man down, saying he was past it, he was old, he looked ugly, his music didn’t matter, and on and on.

In point of fact, as an unbiased visitor from out of town, I feel qualified to say that Rozz Williams looked ethereally beautiful. I don’t recall what he was wearing. My attention was drawn to his face and the encounter was brief, but his makeup was deft and creative for a man to be wearing. He looked timeless, not old. His music had made a difference to a large percentage of the people in the room. Even to people who were not big fans of Christian Death or Shadow Project, Rozz Williams was an important creative driving force in the West Coast deathrock scene and his influence helped launch so many bands and so many cool creative people.

Fast forward a few years. Rozz Williams has committed suicide. Nightclubs in Los Angeles throw mournfests for him and they get good turnout. People speak his name reverently, they press fist to chest and say, “mi hermano.” I’m probably spelling the Spanish incorrectly, but you get the idea. (They might not be pronouncing the Spanish either.) I remembered the crush of people running Rozz Williams down. Although the Probe was one of the biggest nightclubs I had ever been to and they thought the man was worth throwing a night for, while he was still alive, most of their patrons couldn’t support someone who’d made such a difference . . . not while he was still drawing breath.

People often ask me to pin down precisely who Blue Blood is for. Gothic, body modification, deathrock, punk, fandom, glam, rivethead, ad infinitum. Really, Blue Blood is for people who have moved through a lot of subcultures. For people who have that maverick something different. Who feel a certain attraction in a lot of those scenes, but who do not feel wholly satisfied in any particular one. Blue Blood is for people who enjoy exploring and experiencing the creative fringes, and the cultures which thrive there, but don’t want to cram themselves into some cookie-cutter mold.

In the deathrock scene, it is rare that the people who have accomplished a lot get very much credit for it. The thing which made me think of Rozz Williams was noting that a link to BlueBlood.net was removed from Wikipedia’s woefully incomplete and slanted entry on deathrock. Someone had complained that Blue Blood was porn and thus did not belong. First of all, if deathrock is supposed to be for gothic folks with balls, what is anyone doing whining about smut practically designed for them personally? The multitalented Jeremy Meza’s late lamented deathrock mag Ghastly described Blue Blood as “It’s the one you’ve been waiting for! Death rock porn! Punk smut!” (For years, I used to run that quote with an ellipses in place of the word porn because I am troubled by the semantics, but that is a subject for another article.) Secondly, BlueBlood.com is where the naughty pictures are. BlueBlood.net is where we run lots of free articles and free forums and free promo tools for the scene. Blue Blood magazine in print had both deathrock music press and erotic photo sets in the same place. Glad I could clear that up for anyone that all was not patently obvious to. A bizarre percentage of the Wikipedia entry is on the Long Beach club Release the Bats. Blue Blood were huge early boosters of that club night. We shot tons of photos there. At great personal cost, I might add, as we were using film. We hyped Release the Bats both online and in print. Release the Bats was kind enough to host the re-launch of BlueBlood.net party. Whether someone thinks Blue Blood is the best thing to happen to deathrock since Sex Gang Children and 45 Grave or not, the deathrock connection is undeniable. At some point, perhaps I may attempt to list all of the luminaries, of the deathrock world, Blue Blood has done something with. I’ll include Jeremy Meza and Ghastly, although neither is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for deathrock. Viva Britannica.

There are a lot of appealing things about the deathrock scene. I love a non-wussified gothic look with yummy torn fishnet and leather and Alien Sex Fiend has smacked me from the stage with an obscene balloon. (Recurring motif. I guess there is something about me which makes bands want to press lewd balloons against my flesh.) The appeal of deathrock is why so many of us have spent time figuring out the hair products needed to create a devil lock or ordering expensive import CDs. But the problem with that scene, like many others which remain subculture, is that the nail which sticks out gets hammered down.

Blue Blood is for the nails which stick out.

Andy Laplegua is a busy man. In the past year alone he has released three full length albums. Icon of Coil, his most popular band in the US, did Machines Are Us, Combichrist, a noisier EBM project, did The Joy of Guns, and Panzer AG did This Is My Battlefield, a darker, more goth/industrial album. Andy Laplegua is the frontman of Icon of Coil, but Combichrist, and Panzer AG are his solo projects.

He has produced a track for Apoptygma Berzerk, and done numerous remixes for bands such as VNV nation, Funker Vogt, Apoptygma Berzerk, Hocico, De/Vision, Mesh, and just about any other electro project you can think of.

I caught up with him after a Combichrist show at Das Bunker in Los Angeles. He was still covered in blood from a photo shoot with Amelia and Forrest earlier in the day. Heres how it went.

Kellie: Great show. Nice fake blood by the way.

Andy: [laughs] Thanks.

You usually wear latex on stage. Are you into the fetish scene, or just the fashion?

I’m not so much into the fashion itself, I love the look and feel of it. I am very much into the fetish scene. I love rubber.

What other fashion do you like to wear?

House of Harlot, Skintwo, Marquis, Cyberdog, DSL, Lipservice. And anything else I see that I like.

What are you drinking?

Jack Daniels.

Straight?

On ice.

I see you have a Johnny Cash tattoo.

I got this tattoo by a great artist named Deacon at Holy Mother Tattoo in Atlanta, Georgia. He actually did this whole half sleeve. It’s a tribute to Johnny Cash, when he died. He is one of the most important artists to me, the whole reason to do music. The way he was a story teller, a great inspiration to all artists. Always the man for the little man. Always true to what he did.

What other music do you listen to at home?

I listen to a lot of cock rock, and real industrial. Not the shit that’s mostly played in this scene. Everybody seems to copy each other in this scene. I go out of this scene to find inspiration. Turbonegro, Manowar, Nitzer Ebb, Klinic, Backyard Babies. You know, they play Backyard Babies at the Kentucky Fried Chicken here in Germany.

KFC huh? You live in Germany now, right?

Yes. Everyone I am working with and everyone I want to work with is in Germany. I’m closer here than anywhere else in Europe. It’s a music metro. And Hamburg has got a great red-light district. You can do what the fuck you want, and no one will bother you.

You’re from Norway though. Do you know the guys from Zeromancer, or Apoptygma Berzerk?

Sure, they are all good friends of mine. We all started making music at the same time, going in total different directions. But ironically enough, we all ended up in the same scene. Being quite successful.

So, all you rock stars hang out together regularly?

We hang out as often as we can, we have an unbelievable time together. I hang out with Ronan from VNV Nation, Eric from Catastrophe Ballet, and Bjoern from Fortification 55, mostly, since we all live near each other. But when we go out, it’s everyone together. Suicide Commando, Dimmu Borgier, Mayhem, Hocico. Good times.

What are your immediate plans for the future?

A new Icon of Coil single is coming out. A new Combichrist EP is coming out in October, the same time I’ll be doing my Icon Of Coil US tour. The new Combichrist album should be out by January. I will be playing a lot of festivals this summer. WGT, Mera Luna, Industrial for the Masses, Infest, Summer Darkness.

You’ve got a very sexy accent. What languages do you speak?

Norwegian, Swedish, English. My German is Okay.

Say something hot to me in Norwegian.

Noe Varmt paa norsk.

What does that mean?

[laughs] I could show you.

And last, besides anyone here, who is your favorite Gothic Slut?

Hmmm…what’s the girls name with the blonde dreads and the tattoos from her arms to her legs?

Voltaire.

Yes, yes. Shes hot. They’re all hot. You want to introduce me to some? Then maybe I can give you a better answer. [laughs] I’d love to see more of the
Rubber Dollies site. I’ve only gotten to see what comes out in Marquis every month.

Thank you for the interview, the show was great. Everyone seemed to enjoy it. I look forward to seeing you live again.

No problem, thanks to you too.