Lumino: What has changed or how has your music evolved from “Commencement” to “Phantasmagore”?
EB: I would say “Commencement” was a little bit more synthetic, while (“Phantasmagore”) is a little bit more organic, it takes from our old influences but also from people like Queens of the Stone Age and people that remind us that great music is very much alive now, and when we started doing it, it wasn't, it was doom metal or it fuckin' sucks. So now the water's warm for good music, and our keyboard is like Wendy Carlos, the water's warm for reverb and all that. So the first album was Gary Numan, Type-O Negative, Black Sabbath, now we're into much more sort of like Bauhaus and our keyboard is sort of (like) Wendy Carlos, and all the abstracts like David Bowie and Brian Eno were doing in the late '70s-so it's very much of an organic record and not so synthetic-and it's very rough around the edges, and we wanted it to be like that-so it's very much an underground record-so ya know, it's rough.
Lumino: How did you get together with Korn?
EB: We've been with them for 11 years now, we've always been part of that original sort of nucleus of (Limp) Bizkit and Korn and those guys, so it's just now that we're finally starting to catch up with them. But just now. So we're glad that we stuck to our guns and stayed w/ Korn, because I knew it would be a matter of time before people discovered what was cool-it always takes the main populous-so hopefully there is a little more mainstream acceptance of this album than the next one.
Lumino: So you're on the Family Values Tour, how long have you been on that tour?
EB: We've had four shows and there's about another 30, they're great shows, very diverse line-up. It's not just hard-core, it's meathead, it's very diverse, and Deftones and Korn are now legacy bands so it's a great association for us, and we definitely want to explore with a lot of different bands and stop off with different bands before we start our own headlining club/tour process, 'cause you know the last one was a long hiatus-but the hiatus was good because the culture caught up with us.
Lumino: So where do you guys live?
EB: We're from all over, but we're an L.A. band because that's where we started, that's where we were living at that time. So some of us are living in upstate New York now, and some of us other places-we live all over-but we come together (for the music).
Lumino: Do you tour a lot?
EB: Well we're gonna be, we'll tour this album all the way through Nine Inch Nails-we haven't established ourselves yet, so it's a little bit of a wait and see thing, cause we know what we are doing is real and it deserves to be out there and in people's consciousness.
Lumino: Were you guys influenced by--or do you admire--any bands or musicians?
EB: I very much admire Jack White and Josh Holmes, Troy van Leeuwen from Queens (of the Stone Age) is an old friend-he wrote “Mansion World” and (parts of) Commencement with us, and I've known him for years, so--there's the real guys in music and there's the bullshit guys, and we all know who we are.
Lumino: What year did you guys become a band?
EB: WE did a demo in 1995 and we weren't a real band until we did our first show in December of 1999, so we were doing a project with a couple guys from '95 to '99 and became an official band in '99.
Lumino: What kinds of jobs did you have before you got into music full-time?
EB: We never had jobs.
Lumino: Are you anxious to see any other acts at Lollapalooza, or have you seen some already?
EB: Queens of the Stone Age is really all I'm interested in, and they play right after us, and I'm gonna go try and meet up with them right after this.
Lumino: How would you describe your music to someone who isn't familiar with it?
EB: Hard rock with a higher consciousness-all the best stuff from the 70's and 80's. We have a lot of influences and it all comes through in many different ways-it's not just the music, it's so much the attitude, the look. From Warhol to Brian Eno to Bauhaus to way more obscure sorts of things, but I would say if people like heavy music with a higher consciousness, they would love our music.
Lumino: Thanks for your time, good luck tonight!
EB: OK, Thanks.
