Electronic music is evolving faster than anyone expects while taking us places we could never fathom. From Severed Heads and New Order to Coil and Momus, electronic music breaks the stereotype of an art form, which lacking emotion. The style has broken into sub-genres, which exponentially grow. The Super Madrigal Brothers are two men in their 20’s who only meet when they play live. While Sir John Fashion Flesh is in Detroit, Michigan, Oliver Cobol is in Atlanta, Georgia. Utilizing the Internet and U.S. Postal Service, they construct charming, “Electro-Elizabethan glitsch-folk” music (as Momus describes), mixing the sounds of video games with classic melodies. The Super Madrigal Brothers are helping to lead the new evolution of electronic music. Originally the idea of Scottish madman Momus, The Super Madrigal Brothers signed to American Patchwork and the rest is history. Their debut album, “Shakestation” was a wild ride of elegant bleeps and charming blips. When Momus released his “Oskar Tennis Champion” LP, John Fashion Flesh re-produced the entire album. As a re-producer, Flesh took the already recorded songs, and basically meddled with the tracks by adding or subtracting melodies and sounds. The other half of the brotherhood, Oliver contributed “The Ringtone Cycle” to the album. “The Ringtone Cycle” was basically a Super Madrigal Brothers reprise of all of the “Oskar Tennis Champion” songs combined into one track. In 2005, The Super Madrigal Brothers released their sophomore effort titled “Baroque In Voltage”. A marvelous and cacophonic journey in electronic classical music, Flesh and Oliver are continuing to dazzle listeners. On a warm spring day in 2005, I talked to both of the brothers while they got high of the electronic classical music they love and create. 

T.JONES: "What goes on?"
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Nothing.”
OLIVER: “Yep!”

T.JONES: “Your new album, ‘Baroque In Voltage’ was just released. Tell us about it.”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “‘Baroque In Voltage’ is the new Super Madrigal Brothers release. It's meant to be three albums in one, in a sense. There is the album as one whole structure, flowing from Oliver's precise and crisp takes on the classics to my train-of-thought psych/prog interpretations of the aforementioned. The other two albums are, that in which there is also a possible half split, in which you could enjoy all of Oliver's tracks or all of mine separately. Although I prefer them as they appear in order.”
OLIVER: “Well, ‘Shakestation’ started off as a concept first and we kind of had to build the musical architecture from scratch, whereas this one felt much more playful, more like we could just take off from that starting point and try new things. It was much more fun to make.”

T.JONES: “What is the meaning behind the title 'Baroque In Voltage'?”
OLIVER: “It is kind of a silly pun. We brainstormed a bunch of names and John came up with that one. It’s supposed to sound kind of like ‘broken voltage’. Kind of an homage to fun 70s synth record titles.”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “The music is very much Baroque music in a historical placement, and the voltage comes into play via all of the self-built analog electronics I used within its recorded walls. Also, it's sort of a play on words, like ‘broke in voltage’.”

T.JONES: “How did you hook up with Fever Pitch and why wasn't this LP released on American Patchwork, Momus's label?”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Well, although I still personally record and work with Momus on his Momus albums, I'm afraid that his label Am Patch isn't currently in the position to release anything new at the moment. We hooked up with Fever Pitch via a friend named Drew D. He is the same Drew who comprises The Soft Pink Truth and one-half of the group Matmos. Drew suggested that we talk a bit with Kurt Stein of Fever Pitch about releasing our new album. So, we did. Now, things are rather good at the moment.”
OLIVER: “The first one really didn’t make any money for anyone. In fact, Momus put out his neck for it. I think he ended up paying for most of it through his own sales. So, we couldn’t really put out another one on American Patchwork. Fever Pitch came up because we had sent out a bunch of demos of new recordings. They had just talked with Momus, who mentioned we were looking for a new label.”

T.JONES: “Could you explain 'The Ringtone Cycle' on the "Oskar Tennis Champion' album?”
OLIVER: “I did that with bits and pieces from songs I heard as Momus and John were making them. Then, Nick mashed them together at the end. It works as a kind of short-form musical revue of the preceding album. I always felt it was like the end of a musical or something, where you have the credits roll. It is a medley of all the songs, like a unified overture. I was thrilled to be able to do something like that because I’ve always felt a videogame-like structure to Momus songs.”

T.JONES: “How did this relationship with Momus begin?”
OLIVER: “I had been making 8-bit interpretations for a few years. In the summer of 2001, I was putting together ‘The 8-bit Xmas’, which I originally intended to give to Bjork, when I saw her in Boston that year. I never did, but I mailed out a bunch of copies and Momus was the one who heard it and replied first. He told me about The Super Madrigal Brothers project he was developing and invited me to participate. It was like winning the lottery, almost as amazing as meeting Bjork.”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “I met Momus a few years back at a show in Detroit. I had chatted a bit back and forth with him online for a few months prior but never really hit it off until we met in person. I gave him rather odd remixes I did of ‘The Penis Song’ and ‘Robocowboys’.  ‘The Penis Song’ remix was sort of a gloopy, cartoonish, overtly perverted version of the original that illustrated the absurdity of his penis obsession, as expressed in that track. He liked it a lot and the rest just built up like a fast-spreading plague. A day after, I gave him the remix and finally, met him in person in Detroit. He suggested I become one half of the Super Madrigal Brothers and thus introduced me to Adam (Oliver).  After the Super Mad's album was released on his label and we had done the first tour together of the U.S. Nick (Momus) asked me to do some work throughout ‘Oskar Tennis Champion’ LP. By Momus.”

T.JONES: “When did you first begin making music? What was it like?”
OLIVER: “My father was a musician. So, that sort of thing was always encouraged when I was growing up. I started off picking out the Indiana Jones theme on a Yamaha, then learning rudimentary guitar. We got BASIC and some DOS sequencers, so I was doing computer music before I was ten. When I was a teenager, I started making sloppy psychedelic 4-track tapes. In a few years, I started combining the two. The first songs I wrote were mainly written because I loved recording and arranging them. It seemed like songwriting was secondary to me.”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “I'm a bit bored with circuit bending at the moment. I think it's rather limited in the sounds you can get. It's all digital clicking and such. I bought my first synthesizer at around 12. Drum machines became a cool to me around the same age. I never played guitar or anything like that. Piano was a part my traditional upbringing. I started to modify my synths and drum machines when I was about 17 or so, I think. I wasn't scared to break them because they were immensely cheap and unpopular when I bought them from pawn shops in my early teens.”

T.JONES: “So, Momus put together the group? How did you two meet and what was that like?”
OLIVER: “He was exploring the ‘Folktronic’ idea and started theorizing these musical combinations and bands. ‘Supermad’ actually appears in an essay he wrote several years earlier. Momus was both daddy and mommy to The Super Madrigal Brothers. It was a bit like real life. I had no choice in who was my brother or not. It seemed pretty random to me. I think Momus was piecing things together in his mind. We just made sense together. It could have been two other people or it could have been no one at all. We fit into the strange attractor, so it works. We really are like distant brothers.”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “I met Oliver through Momus. He simply introduced us by swapping our e-mail addresses. We quickly learned that we could work with each other quite well through the help of the postal service, mainly sending CD-R's to and from each other.  We didn't meet-up in person until about two months after the completion of the first Super Mad album.”

T.JONES: “The idea for the band was all from Momus?”
OLIVER: “Yes.

T.JONES: “John, could you explain your role as a re-producer on the ‘Oskar Tennis Champion’ LP by Momus?”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “On 'Oskar Tennis Champion', I more or less took the produced tracks from Nick and re-produced them quite literally. Some songs sound much different than the original takes. Others retained some major similarities. I did a lot of different things with his vocal takes as well as the actual music/sounds. There were a lot of added hills and mirrors, breaking and rebuilding but most were all done outside of the computer realm. I'm quite certain that wonderful things really happen away from a computer screen.”

T.JONES: “What was your role on the ‘Otto Spooky’ LP by Momus?”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “I created 30 second to 2 minutes plus transitions that connected and disoriented the album with and from itself and hopefully and ideally, the listener. As far as equipment I used on that album, it was more or less all stuff I built, filters and audio sources. The transitions were placed at the end of each track but not the last track, for obvious reasons. All self-built circuits, no circuit bending.”

T.JONES: “Oliver, you are a self-confessed media junkie. Could you explain? Also, what is it about media that you are addicted to?”
OLIVER: “I like pop culture a lot. I think it shows good and bad things about our collective unconscious as a species. Humans have a funny way of looking at the same thing from a lot of different perspectives, so you get funny inconsistencies that I find charming. When I say that I am a 'media junkie' but I don’t just mean pop media. I mean sort of anything we create with our minds.”

T.JONES: “Can you explain the meaning and origin of the group’s name, Super Madrigal Brothers?”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “No, actually I can't. The Super Mad name was an invention, more or less of Nick Currie. The obvious meaning to me. It is, it in fact, more or less deep rooted in the 8-bit sound. Super Madrigal Brothers is like Super Mario Brothers. A lot of the Madrigal comes into play with the fact that our first album is composed mainly of religious classical pieces which are madrigals.”
OLIVER: “I don’t know. I think it would mean something different to whoever hears it. Like, Momus might think it means one thing and I think it is something else while John thinks it’s something else. Aside from the obvious verbal joke, it is about time control. It’s about minimizing the lines between the past and the present. Light travels at a finite rate, so everything you see is in the past. Sound travels much, much slower, so it seems like the gaps are much greater. You could say ‘Oh that's so 2004!’, or whatever about a song and it would be acceptable, whereas if you said that about something visual, it would be more funny because it doesn’t seem as far away. I think the name is about trying to synchronize these streams.”

T.JONES: “What CDs, tapes or LPs have you been listening to recently?”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “I listen to a lot of the same things I've been listening to for many years. My favorites are the Severed Heads 'Come Visit The Big Bigot', Yello's 'Solid Pleasure', White Noise's second LP, a lot of novelty LPs like carousel recordings. They're wonderful because you can hear the motors working as loudly as the music. I can come up with like a top 40 list of my favorites (Laughs). That would be boring and obsessive I think though.”
OLIVER: “I really like the new Mu and Phiiliip records. Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Back Too The World’, ‘BBC Radiophonic Workshop’, Enoch Light, Jonathan Richman, Cowsills, Three Six Mafia, and The Germs. Whatever I can get. I found the ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean’ Disney ride soundtrack at a thrift store I still listen to.”

T.JONES: “Video games seem to play an important role in the sound and imagery of the group. Why? What are some of your favorite video games?”
OLIVER: “I’m a child of the eighties. Videogame soundtracks hit that sentimental point that a Carl Stalling score might have for people who grew up in the 50s with Bugs Bunny cartoons. I also have immense respect for the computer as the next step in human evolution. I just try to celebrate this era. My favorite game of all time is ‘Super Mario Brothers 2’ because it’s such a visually weird game. It is a bastardization of another game. It is like Eastern and Western myths combined, Brooklyn plumbers and an English princess meet ancient Egypt, flying carpets, ritualistic masks, etc. The music is so inbred that it’s beautiful. Calypso, ragtime, atonalism, German expressionism, and Egyptian jitterbuggery.”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “I think that, for me, the sound and look of old videogames are a lot more interesting than the games themselves. I used to play them, but I only played them to look at them, really. I really like the look of a few Atari games. I think my favorite is called 'Bugs'. It was a paddle game.”

T.JONES: “When making a song, do you have an idea planned or is the song mainly an improvised, spur of the moment creation?”
OLIVER: “It’s a lot like Chinese Whispers. I usually find a midi file first. From there, I improvise different arrangements on top of that. The intensity or tempo may change drastically depending on how I think it feels at this point. It’s improvised arrangement. I usually don’t hear an authentic rendition of the piece until long after I've finished my version. All Super Madrigal Brother songs are based on earlier compositions.”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “There are a lot of different things that happen in my Fashion Flesh work from what happens in the Super Mad’s work. As far as the Super Madrigal Bros, I approach songs as a sort of train-of-thought composition for each reworking / reproduction. Sometimes, I’m drawing a lot on the original structures and sometimes, not at all. It's supposed to act as my mental picture of what the original has drawn within my thoughts, no matter how beautiful or ugly that may be.”

T.JONES: “Where are you two from?”
OLIVER: “John is from Detroit. I live in Atlanta. I’m from a rural part of Georgia.”

T.JONES: “There was a time you two were making music but never met, right? Can you explain that? What was that like?”
OLIVER: “Only in live performances, do we ever make music together, simultaneously. That’s hard to put together with the large geographical distance between us. It’s more Chinese whispers. I complete the arrangement and e-mail an mp3 to Flesh. He sends it back dipped in acid. If I’ve copied a copy of an original, he makes another copy, so the song lives in 4 dimensions. It is like throwing dice because I never know what John's song will sound like. There is an almost a nonsensical success rate to his interpretations. It feels like it works so well, perhaps astonishingly so. Momus must have found a strange attractor.”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “I think that the way I work with Adam (Oliver) is much the same as it has been even before I met him in person. We deal with each other very much in a sort of pen-pal sense of collaboration. I think it really keeps the element of imagination peaked, as we don't even look at each other in the physical sense. We only deal with each other’s raw ideas. It's quite nice actually to work with people over long stretches of distance, in my opinion and experience. It really keeps the strangling down to a bare minimum.”

T.JONES: “What is your favorite part of your live show?”
OLIVER: “My favorite part is hearing the tracks we've done together on a large stereo system. Through small speakers, it sounds more or less like videogame music, more in my case than in with Flesh's tracks. With a lot of volume, it feels much more grand, more like what I imagine it should ideally sound like. After that, it’s our improvised noise washes that coat over these backing tracks.”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “My favorite part of the live show is the inconsistency that is the organic things that occur from playing with Adam, whom I know quite well in an artistic / collaborative sense, but not so well in a social-bumming/hanging sense. It really makes things extremely surreal. It also makes us both work our hardest to impress one another, thus making a sloppy live set nearly impossible while still retaining all shrapnel and ooze of an improvised set.”

T.JONES: “Besides music, what do you do for a living?”
OLIVER: “I’m in school, trying to become a licensed graphic designer, so I can get by making animations, web stuff, graphics, etc. I tend to go from moneymaking jobs to the next every so often. Last year, I was working for the IRS, typing 10-40's into a massive database, which was strangely enough, the most liberating job I’d ever had.”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Graphic design freelance when I need to. Nothing else, really. My life is more or less based around the sounds and images I make.”

T.JONES: "Where were you during the September 11th terrorist attack? How did you deal with it?"
OLIVER: “My roommate woke me up. I had passed out on the couch while listening to a Three Suns record. My roommate said ‘Dude, someone flew a plane into the Pentagon.’ I was saddened and stunned, of course. I went to class. Looking back on this, I don’t really know why I went, considering how big and life-changing it felt that the time. I spent the rest of the day with friends, looking for a bowling ally that was open and postulating as to whether or not this would lead to nuclear war.”

T.JONES: “What do you think about the U.S. involvement in the Middle East?”
OLIVER: “I think I have conflicting opinions just like everyone else. Do I think it’s wrong that we are killing people? Well, of course I do. Do I think there are people in other countries threatening our national security? I do on that also, though that is definitely being blown out of proportion to control our population. I think the way it’s being handled has resulted only in degrading America’s image worldwide. It is like throwing oil on a fire to put it out. I think that people in charge have financial gain on the way they are handling it, but this is always the case. At the base level, I don’t think killing people is going to get anybody anywhere.”

T.JONES: “Word association. I am going to say a name and you say the first word that pops into your head. So, if I said 'The Beatles', you may say, 'John Lennon' or 'revolution'. Okay?"
OLIVER: “Okay.”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Yes.”

T.JONES: "Gil Scott-Heron."
OLIVER: "Light azure lakes."
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Book-esque”

T.JONES: "Momus."
OLIVER: "Ionic pillars."
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Dad.”

T.JONES: "The Brian Jonestown Massacre."
OLIVER: "Smashed box of Camel Lights."
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Rolling Stones.”

T.JONES: "Curtis Mayfield."
OLIVER: "Clouds."
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Bald.”

T.JONES: "Psychic TV."
OLIVER: "Jail."
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Breasts and teeth.”

T.JONES: "The Stone Roses."
OLIVER: "Berries."
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Piano.”

T.JONES: "Happy Mondays."
OLIVER: "Grape jelly."
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Tambourines and paint.”

T.JONES: "The Charlatans UK."
OLIVER: "Fog and concrete."
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Lips.”

T.JONES: "Wu-Tang Clan."
OLIVER: "192 kbps."
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Play-do.”

T.JONES: "Severed Heads."
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Childhood.”
OLIVER: "What do you call those sticky things that you get in department store quarter machines? Little hands made of Jell-O that stretch and stick to things? Sticky hands."

T.JONES: "Close Lobsters."
OLIVER: "Hangers, wire hangers."
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Stickers.”

T.JONES: "The Fall."
OLIVER: "Bees."
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Hairpiece.”

T.JONES: "Stereolab."
OLIVER: "Cottage cheese."
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “French teacher.”

T.JONES: "George Bush."
OLIVER: "Fire ants."
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “No.”

T.JONES: “Do you have a favorite instrument? What about that instrument makes it your favorite?”
OLIVER: “Drums, definitely. I don’t know. I just like the range of sounds you can get. It feels like anything can be a drum, whereas with a guitar or a cello or something, the parameters of what makes a cello a cello, are much stricter. You can pick up a glass of ice and amplify it and it’s a drum though. Also, repetition is the basis of pop music. It just feels so primal.”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “I really love maracas a lot, although I don't use them too much myself. I like the way they are so very, very simple and any one can use them. They have a whole lot of Spanish load to them I suppose, but they sound quite un-cultural to me in sound, which I like. The best culture is one that is lacking, I think, in the realm of sound.”

T.JONES: “What is in the future for you two separately and / or The Super Madrigal Brothers?”
OLIVER: “Well, I just made a video for a track from the new album. http://supermadrigalbros.com/Sing/sing.html I think we're going to make a track for the next ‘Electronic Bible’ compilation from Ann Shenton. I want to play shows again. Maybe, we'll tour this summer or something. As for Oliver Cobol, I’ve been developing an analog-electric pop concrete side project called Phonepunk, which I’d like to extend to a found sound thing, in general. I have been recording Theremin parts for a record by a local punk band called The Spooks. I’ve started painting and I am working on computer graphics and websites too. I really need to get a job. I’m dead broke.”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Well, there is talk of a vinyl release for the Super Mads as well as for FF in the near future. Hopefully, lots of releases for my Fashion Flesh output. I need to find a lot more labels that are willing to release what I have been recording. There are lots of albums that could qualify in definition as concept albums, at least in the sense of having a reoccurring theme in the content on each. Also, I’m building lots of new devices to which I shall be performing live with, as well as doing more recordings.”

T.JONES: “Any final words for the people who are reading this?”
OLIVER: “If there is one thing this world could benefit from more than anything, it would be if everyone gave each other a basic level respect.”
JOHN FASHION FLESH: “Stop sampling other artists work. Make your own paintings and sounds. Leave your laptops off the stage!”