Collide, The Secret Meeting, and More
Recently I reviewed Ultrashiver, the new album from 
The Secret Meeting. As you can no doubt tell from my review, I loved it, and I was able to arrange for an interview with kaRIN and Statik who, along with Dean Garcia, created the album. But The Secret Meeting didn’t come out of nowhere, Statik and kaRIN have been creating some of the most incredible musical works of any genre for years now, and the list of people that they’ve worked with is incredible and includes musicians from Tool, Nine Inch Nails, and Skinny Puppy. I’ve included some of their music videos so you can check out the music, style, and energy that Statik and kaRIN have been putting out there from their own label since the early nineties. What follows is only part of the interview… on my next G-Spot segment we’ll talk more about this new album and how it came together. For now, I present the first part of our conversation about
Noiseplus Music,
Saints & Sinners, and
Collide.
Wes:
kaRIN, I’ve read about how you’d started Saints & Sinners, but for people who don’t know what that is,
could you explain a little bit about sort of the fashion side, the design elements that you work on sort of separately from Collide
and what you do with music?
kaRIN:
Sure. In my not- so- spare time, I’m also a designer. Actually I have been for most of my working life a designer, and worked for myself. So it’s already kind of normal for me to kind of work for myself. Basically I create and make things. I use a lot of images and work them onto different items like cases and purses and belts, that kind of thing. I designed jewelry for a long time and used any kind of component I could find to create art jewelry.
And then I’m also a painter, so I’d found painting was a really good way to release myself, and then I found I could take those images and then work them into other things.
Statik:
Is there any time when you’re not making anything?
kaRIN:
No. I’m always making something.
Wes:
Well, this layering and layering is definitely a theme it seems with both of you. Not just in this new work, on The Secret Meeting, but throughout the music of Collide, this layering really creates a sort of texture that I don’t hear in a lot of other places, or that I don’t see other people doing. Is that accurate? Is that how you see it too, this creation of multiple layers and density?
kaRIN:
I think so. I think we strive to really push it up a level, and that sort of takes a lot of time and attention to detail, and that’s what Statik does. He finesses it and layers it, and sort of brings it up as far as where we can take it, instead of rushing to get the song done, and then running out and playing it live.
To us it can be a really long process, and it’s not a quick process. It’s like you’re making a very intense and complex stew.
Statik:
I actually tried to not have so many layers going on all the time but it’s really hard for me.
Wes:
I would imagine you keep working with it until you get it to a point where you’re happy.
kaRIN:
That’s how we feel, for us it really is a labour of love. What we’re trying to get out of it ourselves is something we love and can stand behind and go ‘Hey, we think we’ve made a cool album.’ We wouldn’t let go of it unless we thought we had done the best that we can do and it was an album that we wanted to go listen to.
Statik:
I think it really takes us as long to mix and finalize the record as it does for the whole writing part.
kaRIN:
The whole thing is quite a process, it can take months to write a song vocally. Every part of it can take a long time, because it’s all really important to us.
Statik:
And we’re just slow.
kaRIN:
No, we’re not really slow, it’s just a long process. We say that we’re slow but really, it’s not that we’re slow..
Statik:
We are slow.
kaRIN:
Okay, we’re slow. It’s a long slow process.
Wes:
But there’s a lot that goes into it.
kaRIN:
There is a lot that goes into it. It’s not like you whip out a song and it’s all there and then it’s like ‘Great, now we can have lots of free time.’
Wes Unruh:
I’m only familiar with what I’ve learned from listening to your music and checking out the Noiseplus Music site and the myspace band pages, so I guess I’m curious What can you tell me about the history of The Secret Meeting?
kaRIN:
Well, I was just wasting some time and surfing around on myspace and happened to come across Dean Garcia’s solo page. And we were familiar with his work, because obviously he’d worked with Curve. That was a band that
Statik and I loved. So I just, kind of on a whim wrote him and said hey, if you ever need a guest vocal I’d be interested. He happened to write me pretty much right back and said yeah, that’d be a great idea, and he sent some rough instrumentals to play around with, I sent him some rough vocals back, and that was sort of the beginning.
Right after I sent him the vocals back we sort of decided that we’d want to do more. And I asked Statik if he’d want to be part of it and he did, and so that was the beginning.
Statik:
We were actually working on 
Collide material at the same time, at the beginning of the project, and The Secret Meeting started with Dean sending ideas our way so it was sort of a totally separate entity.
It wasn’t us starting ideas and giving those ideas to him, it was definitely everybody being involved.
Wes:
I like the songs a lot, I really like Shiver X that opens the album and I loved Shooting Laser Beams.. partly because I’m kind of a comic book nerd.
Anyway I love the lyrics kaRIN, you’re an excellent poet and I really enjoy the writing aspects.
kaRIN:
Thank you! A lot of times when I’m writing.. you know first of all you want to write something you really feel and it takes a while to develop it. Sometimes it’s really a matter of abstracting it too,
so it doesn’t just seem cliche’, or like you’ve heard it all before, or whatever. So that’s the one thing that I find most challenging about writing songs. It’s not singing them or the melody or the notes, it’s really about getting the words that I like.
It can be a struggle because words are really important to me. If I hear a song I can love the song, but if I don’t like the words I won’t really love the song. So it’s important to me. And with The Secret Meeting I was playing around with a little bit more playful elements, like superheroes and things like that. I was having a little bit more fun with it.
Wes:
So do you find that other bands envy your position, you know, running your own label, doing whatever you want within the studio setting, and being in full control creatively? It seems like there’s not a lot of bands that are able to do that.
kaRIN:
We don’t really think of it that way. You know, we have a lot of friends in other bands, some of them are in bigger, more successful bands than we are and some of them aren’t, but we don’t think of it in that way.
Statik:
I don’t think it’s something that everybody necessarily wants to do though. It is a lot of work past just making the record. A lot of people aren’t prepared to put in the time and the energy it takes to do all the other stuff that’s involved.
They want to just hand their cd in to somebody and be done with it, and at that point sometimes a lot of people get disappointed that more is not done with the cd. It’s good and bad doing it yourself because at the point when you get done with it, you don’t have anybody else to blame if nothing happens.
If you want something to happen, you have to be in charge and make it happen.
kaRIN:
And there’s definitely a lot of work to it. You know, anybody could do it if they wanted to.. it’s kind of like if you wanted to put the work into it you could do it. There’s nothing stopping anybody from doing it. It’s just challenging. It takes a lot of time. And sometimes, especially with artists, it’s not what they want to be doing. They want to be making things or they want to be touring, that kind of thing. And running a label takes a lot of time and energy. But for us it works because it gives us all the control, and it feels like it works for us.
Statik:
We have nobody to blame if things don’t go the way we want them to..
kaRIN:
And just the process over the years of trying to learn, trying to figure out what we like, what we think is interesting. And then pushing that as far as we can push it within whatever we might happen to like while having fun with it too, exploring, working with different people.
Remember, there’s more of the interview on the way. Check back as I’ll be talking more with Statik and kaRIN about the album Ultrashiver by The Secret Meeting on my upcoming G-Spot. We’ll be playing a new track of the album while talking about the process that brought this project into existence. Until then, here’s more to hear if you follow the links:
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