Just Beneath the Surface

Lyrically intelligent with complex musical arrangements, coupled with intricate instrumentation — who would have thought that four guys from Peoria, Illinois could rock so hard? The members Mudvayne — bassist Ryknow, guitarist Gurrg, drummer sPaG and vocalist Kud — maintain a façade of face paint, while cranking out music that is simultaneously and rhythmically dark, brooding, and explosive. Beneath the painted exterior a talented and powerful four-piece rock band exists.
Their major label debut entitled L.D. 50, which was release back in late August, 2000, has been gaining more and more ground and has already moved over 100,000 copies. L.D. 50 — short for Lethal Dosage 50, which is the amount of any given poisonous chemical it takes to kill 50 out of 100 test subjects — was produced by Gggarth Richardson and Shawn "6" Crahan, from Slipnot. Richardson, the man responsible for a variety of today’s heavy music, has worked with everyone from Rage Against the Machine to Kittie.
Fresh from live dates at Australia’s Big Day Out, Mudvayne is now finding themselves in an amazing position. Between regular rotation on MTV2, a growing amount of rock radio plays for the single "Dig," moving more and more copies of the debut disc every week, and a living up to a constant touring schedule, Mudvayne is building an ever-growing mass of fans. The Synthesis caught up with Kud a few months ago and got him to expound a bit on the new album, the band, songwriting and the influence of Stanley Kubric’s 2001.

So I’ve read that you're a big Stanley Kubric fan.
Yes.

And how did 2001 influence you while writing the album? Besides that your first track on the disc is titled Monolith.
Well, that is just it.

Oh, so I answered my own question.
You can just take any point of reference from that film and then just start a conversation about it. You can develop all these theories, concepts, and ideas and just start conversing about it. It was incredible, just the idea of beginning and ending and consequence. That was really inspiring to us. I read some of the book, too. I didn’t read the whole book, because it wasn’t very exciting, but it was more descriptive of what was going on. You know when they first pick up the bone and start smashing things with it.

When they first learned how to kill.
The book talks about how the race is starving and they have combed the whole area and they are literally starving and weak. The movie doesn’t really go into that, it is not as descriptive, the next twenty minutes after that part there is no dialogue. Just the sense of consequence and beginning to end is just really important to our work.

What do you think of Clockwork Orange and Dr. Strangelove and some of his later work?
Clockwork Orange is just fantastic. It was just really intriguing.

What was he singing during when he are beating the shit out of that guy in his house?
"Singing in the Rain."

That might be one of the twisted scenes ever.
When he grabs her and he has the ball under his crotch and he lifts his thing up and the ball falls out and he catches it, puts it in her mouth, and wraps her head with tape, grabs the breast of her shirt and cuts it off with scissors. I was just overwhelmed, that’s fucked up.

How do you keep your sanity when you are on the road?
I sleep a lot. I draw and I do a lot of writing.

You did all the lyrics on the album right?
Yeah, me and Matt also write together sometimes. We would come up with concepts – like the theme of the record. "(K)now F(orever)," that was a me and Matt conversation. Basically stepping inside of a moment and learning to do that every moment of your life. Just making it everything that it can be, so many things pass us in life. People just let things flow by, and don’t even concern themselves with something as stupid as something laying on the ground. It is kind of a lead in to the next record too. Sort of like a vertical lineage. I think on the next record we are going to go more up than forward. Everybody goes forward.

Exactly, be the one that goes up and be different.
So we are starting here on this record, we just need to find a moment.

How is working with Gggarth Richardson on it, Did he pass on any musical knowledge gemstones to you?
It was incredible. Working with a person like Gggarth Richardson is pretty incredible. He helped us just keep your head together. That is the most important thing in this business. A lot of bands that he has worked with has been kind of like a stars launching pad. They just get lapped into this whole world of shit basically, it’s just not completely realistic.

Well it is the music business.
That’s really hard too, to grow up fast when you are young. So, he is all about keeping a level head about you. So generally the same people who are saying that you are going to be huge won’t take a phone call from you. Keep a nice level head and keep your wits about you. He is just incredible with pitch and rhythm and overall everything in music is just so pristine. We were in the studio and whatever and he was like, "You are pulling it a little" and I had to sit down and be like, "Ok, you are talking about what?" And he said, "See right here?" and just said "Alright – we will just do it again." I just couldn’t physically hear it.

The guy just has an amazing ear.
He has been doing it for years, so he knows exactly what he is doing. He’s really cool, because I think that when he works with a band with emotion he wants to go off of that, he wants to feed off of it and fuel that fire. His recordings go really well. He would have me do whatever, to fit into a box until he thought I was ready, and then he would just roll it and I would get fired up and go through the whole tune. Then we would go back to the beginning and we would do it five or six times.

Until it was right in his opinion.
Until he thought we had the right take or whatever. We would go through some really, raw emotion.

What kind of stuff did he do to the instrumentation on the guitars and drums? During the production did he do anything that was different from other producers you have worked with?
Yeah, he had a truck load of his own personal gear. I mean our equipment got to the studio and they were bringing it up in the elevator and then his got there and it was just like our quarter of the room to his half. He just had tons of stuff, from cabinets of old vintage heads.

Oh, so he just had tons of toys. So you guys must have been in heaven.
Oh yeah, it was awesome. We didn’t have to use everything, but we had a ton to choose from. There were just a lot of options.

I was checking out some of your fan sites. One of them in particular had an update of what Mudvayne tracks were available on Napster. Do you think of Napster as more of a tool to get your music out to the kids or do you feel you’re being taken advantage of?
Bands shouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with that. If you want to look at it, number one it (Napster) is a tool to protect the consumer. I’m telling you what man, there are not enough of those in any other industry and to have that is just awesome. To be able to try out a product is a good thing, because there is a lot of bullshit out there. These bands just keep coming out and it is just the same fucking band. The internet is a wonderful thing – but, then you’ve got twelve-year-old kids going to a porn site to see a girl licking some dog’s balls or something – that’s not healthy. But, you’re going to have that, you’re going to have the Napster horror stories, too. For example – some kid, back from where I’m from – I was walking in the mall and this kid yells my name. So I wait for him to walk up and I’m like, "Okay, who are you?" He is all, "Oh I was just wondering if you were the guy from Mudvayne." I was like, "Are you going to the show?" And he said yeah, so I told him if he picked up the record there, we could hang out afterwards. And, he’s like, "Well this kid is going to burn it for me off Napster and he has all the artwork already, and he is going to print all the artwork and give it to me." I just said "whatever" and turned around and walked off. The artwork and everything! It’s not the same resolution, it’s not the same sonic quality. I was just going off man.

You put the fear of God into him probably.
Yeah, well the kid that was going to burn it for him, is this kid who has been listening to the band for years, I just couldn’t believe it was him.

Well he thinks that he is doing you a favor, but he is not.
Maybe letting somebody burn a copy of the CD or something.

Yeah giving him the whole package, that is a little bit extreme. I don’t know, in a sense I think that Napster might educate people on the way the music industry works and what kind of percentage you guys get to sell the records.
Well exactly, that’s what I told him. Dude, you have been coming to watch my band forever and I asked him if he really liked my band, and he said yes. So I said "Do you really think that every time you buy a CD I get fifteen bucks? I’m not making shit off this record. If you like a band, buy their music, we need the sales or we don’t get another record."

Everybody needs to pay the rent.
I could sell 10,000,000 T-shirts, but the label won’t care if I only sold three records. Honestly, I think the fundamentals of it are a good thing.

So tell me who your musical influences were.
Why don’t you tell me your influences.

Oh man I listen to fucking everything.
No, what do you think my influences were.

I was thinking Mr. Bungle and Faith No More a little bit.
I love Faith No More. Have you heard the new Nothingface?

No.
Oh it’s awesome. I’m into all different styles. In the past – Tool and things of that nature. When I’m at home with my girl, we listen to a lot of dance music. Destiny’s Child, really bizarre shit. It’s good to listen to stuff outside your genre. You can’t handle it on the road, listening to it all the time.

Well no, you‘re playing it. Well, you have to have a diverse array of interests to put together what you guys have.
Yeah, honestly what we do is truly a 100 percent authentic of our artistry. We don’t question anything that comes out of us.

Well, it shows throughout the record, it’s fucking so hard, but at the same time it’s completely intricate and layered. It kind of just grabs you by the throat.
We just start laying shit down and we get to the end of a song and we have like 20,000 different parts. You got to start weeding through it, or sometimes you don’t. That’s what happened with "(K)now (F)orever," we have seventeen different parts in it. We started to go into the arrangement process and we were just like fuck it, and we just left it. We didn’t do it with a song format or anything.

It’s all about the shit you don’t expect.
Well, that’s just what we do. We want to give people something else, because there is a lot of stuff out there that has just become a formula. You can only do that so much.

And that is why those groups end up going away.
For sure. The more dates we get under our belt and the more records we sell, the more people understand what is going on.

And what to expect.
They are beginning to know the record. Before we did the tour, there would always be this huge mosh pit and we would break it up and the kids would just stand there wondering what was going on. Now I’ve noticed that when we break it, they just instantly stop and slow down. It feels great. It has been overwhelming.

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