In our first interview, we present something a bit different - a band interviewing themselves. In this feature, we asked Grant Richter (synth player for space rock poster children F/i) to interview Brian Wensing (guitar/synth player for the same band). Since the early Milwaukee space/noise scene is getting a new level of respect (largely based on the reissues pressed by Australian label Lexicon Devil), we thought we'd have a little fun exploring the world of punk/space/noise/weirdness...

Grant: Hold it a second — let me get my beer.

Brian: Oh, yeah — how can you do an interview without a beer?

G: So, tell us about your first experience with F/i?

B: It was a little two-piece outfit with a couple of friends of mine that I had known for a while. I actually ended up sitting in with them because one of the guys was in two bands, and the other band was playing. Both of those outfits were playing that night, and I ended up stuck in this thing ever since. (laughter)

That’s really how it started. After that the secondary band dropped out of the picture, and it was F/i from that point forward. I was in there as a synth player from the start, actually.

G: Tell us about the equipment you used the first night that F/i played.

B: We had a guitar player with a Gibson SG (or something) through a Polytone amp and a bunch of effect pedals, and I had a Moog Prodigy with my guitar effect pedals and a small amp for that. That was it…

G: What year was that?

B: That would have to be ’81 — I’d like to think it was ’81. By ’82, by that spring, the nucleus of the band really started to gel.

G: Who played that first gig?

B: Well, that wasn’t really F/I — it was the first thing I did with those guys. When we really became "F/I"? I don’t know. I don’t know if I could remember that… A lost summer in a haze of blonga…

G: How long after that did it take to get the Split LP onto the streets?

B: It actually took a lot of cassette networking; we probably did a dozen cassettes of various fidelity and quantity. (chuckle) Depending on where we recorded it - most of it was four-track stuff, four-track cassette, all the way up to Paradise Out Here was all done on four-track cassette. All those RRR records are four-track cassette. Basement recordings. Warehouse recordings. No real studio or no real gear. (laughs) It was done real "DIY" in our own way.

G: Well, let’s talk specifically about the Split LP.

B: Sure. After a while of our taping, there were a few people that were into the noise thing we were into at the time. We did a lot of pure electronics work back then, with Moog Prodigy, the Korg Mono/Poly, Arp 2600 …

G: A jet car?

B: Well, that came along. I’m kind of getting into that.

Using these instruments in the way we were using them attracted the attention of a quite a few of the so-called hipsters in "power electronics" and the noise scene. For the last of any place to put us (in a bin somewhere) at Sam Goody, they put us in there with The Haters and these other outfits. We were never into that kind of politics as far as our music, you know? We always had an underlying rock thing with our various other influences. But the noise people, namely Ron Lessard of RR Records, had already put out a single and a couple other things with Boy Dirt Car, which was another band here in Milwaukee.

Somehow he got wind of us through all the tapes we had put out. He brainstormed the idea of putting out this Milwaukee thing, putting Boy Dirt Car on one side and F/I on the other.

G: F/I and Boy Dirt Car also did gigs in Milwaukee together?

B: Yes, actually, I think there were at least two shows (or, at least one, if not more…) that I remember at the Odd Rock, where Danny Kubinski and Keith Brammer of Die Kreutzen brought in a 10-foot section of highway Armco and were banging on that for a while. Using power tools and assorted "grit" …

G: Remember the sparks shooting out from the grinders? 10, 11 feet…

B: In a small Milwaukee club, it was quite a sight to see! The Armco was sticking out of the rear of the stage (there was a door back there); I think half the rail was out in the parking lot. They could only get a little bit of it on the stage. (laughs) We played that night, and may have done other things as well. Maybe not just Boy Dirt Car and F/I, but part of a larger festival-type thing, where we both appeared.

Because we had a shared recording and shared a home town, a lot of people thought we were living in the same house, too! That was certainly not the case. But, as far as the live thing with those two bands, there was never a "Great Synergy" or anything. It just so happened that we played a few gigs together.

G: You guys just knew each other?

B: We all knew each other, but it’s not like we all hung out.

G: So the decision to put the two out back-on-back was Ron Lessard’s?

B: I believe it was purely a Lessard brainstorm. So, that’s how the Split LP came about, which featured one of my favorite tracks (which opens our side, as well as closes the side). It is a three-engine jet Kenworth, recorded at the Great Lakes Dragaway. These kind of vehicles are pretty much banned now, for insurance reasons…

G: Because they keep exploding and killing people!

B: Not necessarily. You can run a jet, but only a single engine. They don’t let guys get away with these multiple setups any more. So, he had 18,000 (or was it 36,000?) pounds of thrust. We had a boombox, and set up camp about 50 yards behind the starting line. You can hear the track announcer saying "This is Les Shockley, blowing the doors off", you can hear the crowd, the afterburners kicking in. When it’s going "Woof, woof", the timing tower is just shaking on its foundation, and corners of the roof were actually on fire. The guy on the mike is actually getting roasted while he’s making the call. It was quite a visceral experience, and we feel fortunate to get it on cassette, and eventually on the LP (and now, onto CD).

It’s been a long time (since the LP’s release), but it’s still morphing.

The Split LP was a new point in the band’s history, since we then sort of kissed the cassette thing goodbye. We had more aspirations now — "OK, we’ll be on records from now on… We’ll never go back and put out a tape…" unless we WANT to. After the LP was released, Lisard kept the door open for us, he’s always like "Hey, send me a tape…"; if he liked it, he’d press it.

Since we were recording every Sunday, we were sending him plenty of tapes! He managed to put out another 3 of 4 records from that, from ’85 to ’88. In that three year period, we put out the Split LP, "Why Not Now, Alan", Space Mantra and the Boxed Set.

The very first LP that F/I was actually on was a weird compilation on a French label with five American bands — it was "A Compilation of Five Underground American Bands". It was Smersh, No Trend, F/I, The Cyclones and another bands that I can’t remember right now. Most of those bands ended up doing more than just "taping" as well. They put out records… we’ve managed to keep in touch with a few of these people over the years.

G: Talk about how you got from the industrial thrash metal of the Split LP to the biker Space worship of the Space Mantra, and how much you were part of that transition. Was it discussed, or did it just happen organically?

B: It was really a group "Ooof", everybody just thought "Eh, this is what we want to do right now." At the roots of F/I was always bands like Hawkwind, Blue Cheer, Syd Barrett — any kind of psychodelia. There were a few Milwaukee bands that did that as well, like PlasticLand.

We ended up doing the electronic thing because that was the gear we had, and we were having fun doing it. "Wow, this is cool. All these patches ‘n’ stuff. What are we doing? I don’t know, but it sounds pretty wild…" "Listen to it through an echo — yeooow." (laughs)

G: At what point did you switch to guitar?

B: Originally, Greg Kurczewski played guitar, and he kind of was more into a rock thing as well. He hooked up with some other people that were doing a more conventional band thing. At that point, I stepped in with guitar (actually, my guitar is on "Looking For My Head" on the Split LP, with a CryBaby going off).

Halfway through our cassette work, Greg decided we were "too out there", you know? He enjoyed doing it, but… you know, it was three synths and the first Boss Dr. Rhythm, the $50 one.

G: So, you are saying that the reason you were using synthesizers was they were the only things you could afford? Was this a conscious decision? When did the association between synthesizers and F/I begin?

B: Number one, it looked like fun. Rick also wanted to do other things, so the electronics seat was kind of open. That was like my "in" into this band. If figured that, if I bought a synthesizer, I could get into this band! (laughs)

So I ended up with the Prodigy — it’s fun, it’s very simple and I ran it through my guitar effects pedals. I ran it through my Electric Mistress, my Ibanez delay, my wa-wa pedal. You can hear some of those guitar effects going off on those early recordings. The fuzz box — the Fox Tone Machine; and I ran all that stuff through my guitar amp.

G: And you still have pretty much all that stuff today?

B: Yeah, everything that hadn’t been "lifted" over the years of gigging and loosing things — yeah, I still have most of my stuff (except for a few vintage guitars that I had and have gone through…). I still wish I had the Moog Prodigy, and I had a Korg Mono/Poly in a flight case that I got rid of. Luckily, I found another one — and it’s the only synth I own. Of course, I’ll probably have to pick up a Wiard modular one of these days…

G: We’ll have to make a special Brian Wensing Model edition for you.

B: An orientation module… (laughs) Four joysticks — one in each corner, with a big target in the middle!

There are a number of reasons that we moved toward synthesizers. Franecki and I were way into Hawkwind, we really clicked in from there. I know Rick (Richard Franecki) from playing in his first few bands, before F/i. I was a hanger-on to that crowd. That’s how I got to know those guys.

As the F/i project got going, it was this silly little surf/drum-machine thing with Rick and Greg. All of a sudden, people liked this more than every other thing Rick was doing. So he dropped the other projects and decided to make the "Joke" band the real band, and I got in on synth. I always had guitar (I think everyone played guitar at some point). There were no set rules — if you had a cool noise that you were bringing to the table, "Bring it on!".

G: Do you know how many people, over time, have played under the F/i moniker.

B: Oh, geez. Two dozen? Maybe plus or minus 4? There are actually people there today that have been there from the beginning, and could pop up again…

G: So, what’s the strangest thing F/i had ever done?

B: Maybe this was the very first gig we’d done as F/i — the infamous Miss Piggy’s Pub Gig. Miss Piggy’s Pub was this little bar down in Pigsville, under the Wisconsin Avenue Viaduct, about 47^th street (for you Milwaukee folks, by the Miller Brewery). This was my high school hangout because we’d get served, it had a good juke box and was a fun place to hang.

Eventually I talked my way into saying "I have my own band", since he had little blues combos come up there and play. I gave him a couple of our tapes, and we got a show. The lineup was Rick Franecki (bass, probably), Jan Schober (drums), me (guitar), Steve Zimmerman (on shortwave radio) and (I think) Lars Kvam (on sax). We show up for the gig in suits! We looked like the Beatles in ’64.

G: So, your first gig was as "Mods"?

B: We figured that "We are playing this redneck, divey bar in the middle of nowhere. If we wear suits, at least we’ll walk out alive." (laughter) You know?

They moved the pool table out of the way, we set up and eventually start playing. We had no PA or anything; Rick thought we should just turn everything all the way up. "Allright, we’re all for that!" We had the shortwave radio playing through a 100-watt stack of amplifiers and stuff… (laughs)

I think we just started with a big noise buildup before the guitars and drums came in. I look up, and see the bottles of booze behind the bar just sloshing back-and-forth, about an inch in each direction. I could feel the sound going through this place — it wasn’t that big of a room, and this is before the drums and guitars even started. We got about five minutes into the thing, and a guy puts money into the juke box! They turned up the stereo louder that us, and they start moving the pool table back in front of the stage! We slowly start unplugging our gear, and…(sigh)

We got $50 out of the gig, and we got he hell out of there! A friend of mine was watching the door — we played for the door. He had the cash, and we just took off — we did all the "promotion", and we kept all the dough.

G: Redneck contributions to an art band…

B: A year later, the place burned to the ground — so there you go…

G: So, do you consider yourself an artist?

B: I suppose. I consider myself that — even at my job. I’m a machinist, I make parts and every part has a certain art to it. I think I sort of fell into it. I never thought I wanted to be an artist, but both musically and professionally, I’m there. I’m not a "paint" artist, but I work with "forbidden sciences" and "black arts". If you can describe EDM wire better than that, be my guest.

G: What did you get from the punk movement that was positive?

B: Oh, I think our whole aesthetic, where anything goes — that’s why we didn’t care if we were putting out records done on four-track cassette. Who cares? If you had a mic laying around, I don’t care where it was. Does it work? We’d set up anywhere — in Milwaukee, at the time, there were only a few dives where you could set up your band and put on a show. After a while, we got a reputation of being, you know, blisteringly loud. We never got a PA person that knew how to work with us, so by the end of the show, when you couldn’t hear yourself, all our shit ended up being on "10". The PA guy is usually packing out before we are even done…

It took us a few years to find a few PA guys in town that caught wind of what we were doing and thought they could "tame" us. So they were actually willing to work with us, and we now have a few guys that do good work with us. At this point, we don’t have to go to "11" anymore — I can turn up my amp to "1" and still hear it, which is fine with me.

G: Have you ever heard the phrase "radio antidote music"?

B: No, I’m afraid not…

G: That was one of the reviews — the strange "Tape Op" reviews — of F/i.

B: OK. Never heard that one. Of course, if I read every review of everything we’d done, I’d have no time for anything else. I don’t know how many people have come up, or mailed, or emailed and said "Oh, yeah. I saw a great review of this…"

I hardly have time to run down to a trendy store and pay $10 for an imported magazine to read a three-paragraph review of a project I was on.

G: Up to 20 years ago…

B: Yeah. If you have reviews, please send them...

G: What is the mailing address?

B: PO Box 511676, Milwaukee, WI 53203. F/i at that box will get there.

G: In a perfect world, describe the next F/i release.

B: Well, that’s a tough one. In a perfect world, we could have any instrument we’d want, play it in any room that we’d want to play it in and record it onto any medium we’d like.

G: You still have to make choices, though.

B: But I’d probably get old making my choices if I had everything available.

G: Option paralysis.

B: That’s right.

G: I think everyone would like the next album to rock. However, we have to have this balance between space and rock… what is the right balance? 50/50?

B: It’s hard to say. If at that time, we came up with 60 minutes of strong electronic work that we were happy with, it could just be that. It’s hard to say. Do we play it for ourselves, which is what we’ve usually done? We appreciate people that buy our stuff, and come to our shows, but I don’t think we’ve ever consciously made a record for our audience. It’s always been for ourselves.

G: How deliberate is it? Is it like a document.

B: A band is such a complex organism — the people in it have so many things going on, influences; I could be way into Megadeath a year ago, and not listen to them now. Pick a band, it depend on what you are into now. Once in a while everyone in the band focuses on a certain thing, and we get a record that sounds like a certain thing. If everyone is in a different mood, however, you can get a more eclectic, dynamic record.

That’s what I’m kind of hoping for. If everyone comes from a different direction, and we can fuse it together — I want to make records that you can listen to more than once. If somebody sits down to listen to it and says "I couldn’t figger out heads or tails about what I just heard", they will immediately play it again and again to try and understand what’s going on. If you ever see these people, you play in their town, they come up to you and say "Oh, yeah, I kinda have all this stuff figgered out…", you’ve got to take your hat off to them. It’s certainly nothing we planned, but somehow they attached some meaning to it and, well, that’s better than selling all this crap. I’d rather sell a few good records than a lot of bad ones…

G: If you had to pick someone, who would you choose as the "Pope of Space Rock"?

B: Well, that’s a pretty tough question, because that could go way back — back to guys like Verace or something. You could take it all the way back. Or, you could keep it in modern times (say, since the LP was invented) and say people like Nik Turner and Dave Brock and, uh, David Gilmour and Richard Wright. They were messing with Putneys and VCS-3’s when they first came out. Those guys, they were kind of on the cusp of where we took off from. You could even get into the German guys — there are so many names I could mangle right now…

G: Let’s talk about synthesizers, since this is for CreativeSynth.com. When you were using a synth, how do you think about it? Do you have any tricks or insights on them, since you’ve worked with so many. If you had to say something about synths, and your experience with them, is there any way you could encapsulate your experiences? Not specific devices, but as a general "thing"…

B: I think I can answer this question — at least I think I know what you are asking. For myself personally, I was always interested in guitars and stuff, and synths were more of an experimental nature. I know the kind of noises they could make, but I could barely tell you why it made those noises. I knew what I liked.

I think "The simpler, the better." The big programmable synths are great for big programmable songs, but if you want to make fun noise — a Moog Prodigy, or Arp Odyssey are fantastic boxes. All you need is some kind of nice delay on it and you’re in business, man.

I was big on filter sweeps and resonance, things like that. The Korg Mono/Poly has an arpeggiator; you can set up a crude "sequence" and play over it with various "whooshes" and things like that. It’s fun to do in the context of a rock band, where you are just riding this wave of fury, and are just floating over the top with your oscillators — just screaming away, making the people run for the exits… (laughter)

That’s how it was in the early days. People in Milwaukee really didn’t understand what our lineup was, as the people in Europe could understand. Bands like Hawkwind were still popular over there, and still are to this day. I always thought the European audience was more in tune with the experimental side of what we did. To get any kind of play in America at all, we kind of played along with the Pink Floyd/Hawkwind "We can do 3- or 4-chord stuff, too", with the 4/4 beat — but we’ll still have our electronics there, along with tape loops, and shortwave radio, and metal cans and car horns and whatever else (including jet trucks).

G: Well, that’s what I’m a little puzzled about, because… I guess what you are saying is that, from the very beginning, you were thinking about Dave and the Space Rock thing? Even during the industrial period?

B: Certainly. I was not into Skinny Puppy or Neubotin. I knew who they were, and I found it interesting, but it didn’t really strike me as something I’d like to pursue.

G: It’s interesting that, in Germany, Neubotin would be working with found metal percussion, while at the same time that was occurring in Milwaukee. Was one the consequence of the other, or was it spontaneous?

B: I think it was more spontaneous, because our aesthetic was "Anything Goes". If we happened to be in a room with a bunch of metal coat racks and hangers, we used them. They show up on "Why Not Now, Alan" especially, with dumpsters and cars and doors being slammed. It was more a product of your environment. We were recording in a big warehouse, and we were able to open the door and you were out in the parking lot. Everything was available. "Here, mic this up. Try that. Put your amp way out there and we’ll have the mic way over here…" We did a lot of things like that because we could — and we had a lot of fun doing that. We knew we were going to be an experimental band, and so why not experiment? Why try to do it in a conventional way?

We liked having a sorta conventional thing underlying our experimentation, in certain cases. That shows up in our recordings, too.

G: I also hear you saying that F/i had psychedelic root… are you saying you were doing psychedelic industrial?

B: Well, for lack of a better phrase… some of our cassette tapes, which I haven’t listened to in ages, with a surfed out drum machine and echoed out wa-wa guitar… We did a few things with vocals that were processed and distorted — some of it could harken back to The Electric Prunes, or Cream or what some of these other outfits were doing. Like the Nuggets compilation — we were all into that kind of aesthetic. The punk thing really blew it open. If F/i would have started 10 years earlier, it probably would have been Led Zepplin or something, I don’t know. Or Rush. We might have ended up being a "Yes" cover band. I really couldn’t tell you where it would have went.

The backgrounds of all of us were just insane.

G: It always seems like an element… Blue Cheer was used to great effect. It certainly is a recurring theme.

B: It was so audacious.

G: The World’s Loudest Rock Band.

B: Yeah. To just club an audience with a sonic club was kind of a goal we appropriated. You could say that they were one of the first "punk" bands, the sonics and the attitude. We always wanted to challenge our audience.

G: Do you feel that art has to be challenging?

B: Not necessarily. At that point in our careers, as old as we were, the way our lives were (working at menial jobs for menial pay)… Yeah, we were all kind of angry, and we wanted to challenge people. We made albums with doors being slammed, and we called it music. Somebody put it out. Look at you — you are playing Eagle’s covers. It gave us a little bit of swagger or attitude.

We’ll still be going. F/i was conceived as an art project, basically. If you really boil it down, I believe it was a project never intended to end. Whereas many bands are "planned" things. "Well, we do four months, divvy up and we’re outta here."

G: When I joined, Richard told me the artistic goal of the band was simply to continue. Did you and he ever discuss that?

B: Yeah, we were always on that wavelength. That was one of our goals, even if Rick, Greg and I weren’t in it — somebody would have to keep it going. Rick and I are still in it, Rick has recently gotten back recording with us after 10 years.

That’s something to look forward to — more Heaviosity…

G: Tell us about the influence of Germany on you and F/i. We’ve joked about making "The German Album"…

B: Yes, indeed. I think that whole deal where we ended up as a band, invited to play in Germany… eventually, we accepted the offer and (after much weighing it out) Rick decided to stay home and had to take a substitute in his place. It came at a time in our lives where, personally, it was like a second coming of age for a number of us. Just the way you were perceived - in local circles, we were just another curiousity. Over there, we were perceived as artists. The crowd certainly let us know! There were times where we couldn’t even leave the stage.

You get a completely different look at the way you approach your music. The lifestyle is very refreshing. I came back and, really, changed everything I was doing.

G: What is the relationship between F/i and the Green Bay Packers (American football team)?

B: Well, it’s kind of a semi-serious, but almost half-joking… Sunday was our recording day.

G: How many F/I songs are about the Packers?

B: I think we did two — one song, "The Pack Will Be Back", was a punk song from one of Rick’s earlier bands that we covered. On one of our other cassettes, there’s a song about "prolated spheroids" or something. It was a song title or something. It all goes back to references to Sunday, which is the day we got together to record. It was "I’ll be over after the game…"

For more information on the early Milwaukee Punk/Noise scene, you might want to read a feature article at furious.com.

F/i's website is accessible at http://www.execpc.com/~bwnsng/fi.html. Grant's work can be seen at www.wiard.com and www.musicsynthesizer.com.