| Jay Gordon interview by the Australian magazine 'Undercover' done in 1999. |
| If Korn were to meet Human League, Orgy would be the result. Their electronic-metal fusion defines a sound most others wouldn't dare to try. Their debut album, Candyass was released through Korn's very own Elementree Records. Jay Gordon talked to Undercover's Tim Cashmere. TC> Orgy have just surfaced in Australia, perhaps you could tell us a bit about the band? JG> Ah, we've been together for a couple of years. We're signed on Elementree Records, which is Korn's label, through Reprise records which is a division of Warner Brothers. And we're kind of, I don't know, I guess you'd want to call it electronic? There's so many labels for our style. It's kind of crazy, you know, 'Alternative Death Pop', we've heard it all. There's 5 people in the band, two guitar players, just your typical five piece setup, with lots of different instumentation. Not so typical on the guitar side because one of our guitar players plays guitar synth and we don't use regular drums so we're all like, whatever, you get the idea right? TC> With the guitar synth and MIDI drums and all that, is it difficult to blend it in to the rock sound you have? JG> No, because they are played like you'd play a regular guitar or played like you'd play a regular drum kit. My drummers actually doing the timing it's just the sounds that are being triggered and whatnot, so it's all like him hitting on real drums and stuff. TC> Well, you certainly seemed to have burst up to a pretty huge status around The States at least pretty quickly. How did you manage that? JG> Well, we've done well of course because of the Blue Monday song, but we've also toured a lot with Korn, Limp Bizkit you know everyone of the Family Values Tour. Then we went back out on the road again. Now we're going on our first headlining tour. It seems since we've released the record we haven't really left the road for more than a week or two, so we've been on the road pretty much. We've been touring consistantly around the United States. The only thing we haven't done besides press and stuff, my guitar player and I gone over to Paris and Germany and stuff, but we haven't played in Europe. So we've got our first European Tour coming up, and there was mention of Australia and Japan. But I don't know exactly what's going to happen with that but I'd love to be playing down there. TC> We'd love to see you down here. JG> Thank you, you know I'd be really into doing it. I don't know when it's going to happen because I think we're supposed to start out new record soon too. TC> Well, how did you attract the attention of Korn? JG> I've known Jonathan Davis since he moved from Bakersville to LA. I was one of the first people he met when he came there and we've just been buddies for a really long time, and when I did my cd, I had some other record labels that cut the bidding on it and I gave it to Korn's, and they'd just been happening to get their own record label together. So they just put their own little proposal together and it didn't seem any different than signing directly to a major label. But the nice thing of course were being able to get the tours you want to be on, rather than having a label throw you out haphazardly into the music arena, with some band that you just don't know, and we're just going to give you a shitty sound or whatever. and Korn was going to take care of us, give us full sound or whatever. They were great, so we decided to go with their label. TC> Is there anything exciting about Elementree Records? JG> Yeah, I mean they're very artist orientated, as opposed to, they don't turn down your songs. They just try to help you out. If they need to give you a comment, then they'll give you a comment but it's not like 'this is unacceptable' or anything like that. Thy're really artist orientated, so I really enjoy that. So that for any artist is the most exciting thing about a label, if they're really letting you have your creative control and your creative freedom. TC> I hear 'Orgy' isn't a sexually based name... JG> No, no, no. It's not, it's basically just a fusion of a lot of different types of sounds and therefore makes it easier to understand, it's nothing to do with the sex thing. It's just basically different styles, 80's meets 90's style, a lot of different technology. It's music with technology, meets fashion. It's just a big Orgy of sound so to speak. TC> Now what exactly is a Candyass? Does that have a sexual reference? JG> Now, that is the name of a drag queen that I met at a concert in LA one time. He just walked right up to me and said "Hey, my name's Candyass." and I was like "Oh that's a interesting name." so we ended up just kind of using that as the name of our record. So it was just the name of some drag queen that we had met. TC> Well, you have Amir the producer in the band. Has his production gigs with Spineshank and Coal Chamber had any effect on Orgy? JG> No, I produced Coal Chamber. He was my engineer on Coal Chamber. He produced Spineshank. We're both production geeks so to speak. We both went to audio engineering schools so that's where all that came from. That's always good to have, someone I can relate to that understands everything about the studio and stuff, so it's not me doing it by myself or him doing to all by himself, it's a combination of both of us. TC> Why didn't you or Amir produce Candyass? JG> Well, we co-produced it with Josh Abrahams. The band had the say so that they needed. It was just that we really didn't want to, being that we were, putting the record together so fast, we didn't want to waste a lot of time having to figure out everything we wanted an outside ear and we wanted, we didn't want to mix the record either, although on the next record coming up we will be doing the co-production with Josh Abrahams again as well. But we will probably end up mixing a couple of tracks. I and Amir will probably end up mixing a couple of tracks. |
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