Julien-K

Absolutely. Julien-K and Dead by Sunrise are basically a creative collective, we're sort of a Warhol-style factory in that sense. We're a group of really good friends who've happened to luck out and sell millions of records. For the past couple of years the group, as a whole, has produced hours upon hours of music. Besides the bands, we've scored the music for the new Transformers video game, we've got music in movies like Underworld,we perform and we also DJ.

Yeah, same group of people, but the two things people will identify us with will be Julien-K and Dead by Sunrise.

No! Chester is an extraordinarily important person in our lives. He's one of our best friends. He's like a brother. And obviously we admire him as a singer and are blown away to be able to work with him. Although we do get to write and be a part of that process in Dead by Sunrise, it's still very much a part of his soul, he's the lyricist.

We have our project with Julien-K where we get to explore and run the show the way we want. And of course he's in a huge band called Linkin Park but he's not the main controlling force in that band. So Dead by Sunrise comes from him initially, but we all collaborate and work on it together, although we try and keep the integrity of his idea, so it is, obviously, a little more him than Julien-K. Dead by Sunrise is Chester's Julien-K if that makes any sense.

But they are certainly both very important to us. And to us, they are both so enmeshed in one another. I can't imagine not being able to play in both bands. It's sort of a weird thing. When I was in Orgy I remember thinking that I wouldn't want to dilute what we're doing by being in another band. But now I think this is the way to go. It is this huge cool project that has all these different facets.

How funny that you said that, we've actually been referring to it as a hydra of sorts -- you cut a head off and then more grow back. It's definitely what's been happening to us. A lot of things we've worked on, well, the heads got cut off. The heads got cut off but we just started spawning a bunch of different projects.

The funny thing will be if we do Orgy next year.

Then we'll be in three bands. We'll basically be sadists and totally fucked. We'll have to know 48 songs to play at any given time. Orgy is pretty easy for us because it's really engrained in our muscle memory. Julien-K is starting to get like that.

[laughs] It will get to the point where we'll just have to determine which color eyeliner to wear in what project.

[laughs] And maybe the nail polish color, too, depending on what we're doing!

Certainly. Julien-K was spawned out of the inactivity of Orgy. We morphed into Julien-K because we never stopped writing music. Amir and I were always the electro brothers in Orgy. We loved dark, passionate music. We were into stuff like Depeche Mode and Erasure. As we got bigger, Orgy moved into more of the rock realm, which is fine, but given our druthers we'd have been a dark, electronic band. And we just don't have anyone to modify us anymore.

Totally. Lyrically, someone needs to bring honesty and passion back to music like this. That's why Depeche Mode is one of my favorites, too. It's not that we want to be like them, necessarily, but their songs have such lyrical depth. And it was pop. And it's so sexy.

It dripped. So as lyricists and as musicians that is something we really want to bring to the table. My favorite bands of all time have had those qualities. The songs were super pop, they withstood the test of time. When I say pop I don't mean Britney Spears. I just mean songs that you could possibly hear on the radio.

Yes, yes! That's just something I hope will differentiate us from a lot of other bands. We're trying to go somewhere a little bit more daring, more uncomfortable...because expressing yourself and having some emotional content to your lyrics is uncomfortable.

Singing was totally uncomfortable. But Chester and Amir really coached me into being able to be the lead singer. In Orgy I wrote vocals and I sang but I was not the lead singer. But besides that, some of the Julien-K songs that I wrote didn't even see the light of day because they were too personal. It's the flipside of Orgy. Orgy sang about personal stuff but we used fantasy to disguise it.

There are a lot of reasons.

Most of it wasn't of our choosing. We had a shit-load of legal problems that developed from a company that we started, which is an entire, huge, epic story that we couldn't even fit in this interview. It prevented us from releasing our record. But we also had a strategy of wanting to go out and play, with no record out. We played with Linkin Park, H.I.M., Evanecence, My Chemical Romance, Placebo, Mindless Self Indulgence...bands that are really bringin' it in the live arena. We wanted to go out there and prove that we could bring it just as well as those bands and that fans would like us with out having a single on the radio. We had to be good or it wouldn't have worked. If no one liked it, it would have been over, we were just not going to tour again.

But people did like us.

There are actually three versions but the dirty version is really the main version. It depicts the whole idea of the song.

The song is about rock excess and my issues with excess in general. It's an absurd depiction of what people think that we do. There is truth in some of it and there is absurdity in it, too. We took ten years with Orgy and all the things that we've done and sort of rolled it into one song and video. The song is about feeling good in the spotlight. Whereas most people feel uncomfortable the minute people start paying attention to them, there's something wrong with us...

Yes! We're narcissistic fucks. It's that demon in you that you can't turn off and you take too far.

No, it gets worse. Every time you get a taste of it you want to go back. I mean, don't get me wrong, you have to diversify and pay attention to the business side if you want to be doing this forever. We have restaurants and other businesses. But the little kid version of wanting to just go play...that never goes away.

Was it a good review or a bad one?

Well, there was one, but it made us more popular because people were so pissed off about what a douche bag the guy was! It's so ridiculous.

It's so cool it's a place in Orange County [California]. It's dark, we play cool music, it has black chandeliers. It looks like Brooklyn mixed with Barcelona. And it gets bangin' after 10:00 pm. People are hungry [laughs] no pun intended... for a place to go hang out that's in the style that we like...dark, cool. All the other businesses are closed but at 10:00 we're packed, every single night.

Exactly. That's the entirely it. That's our whole interest in it. Its not that we're restaurateurs, we're really just opportunistic business owners, capitalist pigs. We just want to have places where we can go do the business that we want to do, when we want to do it, how we want to do it.

We just wanted a place we could go hang out. We like to keep learning, too. It's a different type of business, its all very interesting to deal with.

Not particularly. We like food. We actually have a personal trainer that we work out with. We do it so we can party and eat the things that we want. We don't want to sit around and eat carrots and fucking rabbit food. We like to enjoy ourselves.

Oh yes. In this business you really have to have a vision and you must be ready to do some things you wouldn't have imagined yourself doing. But thank God people want us to make music for things like vampires and Transformers. Thank God that we're just over-grown children, because robots are pretty cool.

That's what they wanted. They wanted machines. It's very mechanized and cold. Which, of course, is good for us. We're experts at creating very cold music. That's what Orgy was -- very icy. I mean, if we don't make music that works for robots, we might as well throw in the towel. [laughs] We're practically androids.



Julien-K's first album, Death to Analog is out April 7th. Pre-order ASAP and get a limited-edition bonus disc featuring remixes by She Wants Revenge and Paul Oakenfold, among others.