Ray Carney recently contacted the band Butcher and conducted an extensive interview with lead singer Camella Grace.
There’s more coming up after this half hour audio as after discussing the Butcher album Auricle, Ray went on to discuss the photography
work Camella has done with Robyn Breen
as Spiraleyes. Transcript of that part of the discussion follows after the jump, but first, here’s the audio portion of the interview:

This continues the interview as Ray Carney talks with Camella Grace of
Butcher and
Spiraleyes.

Ray Carney:

Okay, so let’s talk about your partner in Spiraleyes, Robyn Breen.

Camella Grace:

About how awesome she is?

RC:

Well you guys’s work is both awesome, I can’t tell you enough. It’s interesting, when I first got turned on to your album, I was turned on to Kyuss, I was looking through stuff with Scott Reeder and I saw there was this Butcher album,
What the hell is this? And I couldn’t find it anywhere, I had to special order it. I was looking at it, and your myspace page, and it was really kind of like a journey, because I’d never really seen
you guys’s photography or anything. And just checking out all this stuff has been really amazing for me, as well as other people I’ve shown it to and stuff like that.

CG:

Yeah, she and I have not done a whole lot recently, although that’s another kind of cool thing. We’re working on redoing our website and we have a few shoots coming up.
She produces a lot of photo shoots for big photographers so she’s kind of been in that world for the last couple of years really being busy that way.
But that kind of stuff is kind of opening up again and so we’re kind of re-putting our energy into making some stuff, so I’m really excited.

RC:

Yes. Well, it shows here on your site you’ve got three different sets, Dream, Nightmare, and Sphere. What’s that about?

CG:

To us it was like we wanted to take a surrealist approach. At one point we had a really good friend of ours who’s a writer, write different interpretations of each photograph
and we were really excited about that, we were going to kind of attach each of those to the pictures.
But then after we did it, we realized that what it was doing was confining the picture, and not letting people have their own experiences or their own relationship with it.

RC:

It was kind of interpreting it for them?

CG:

Yeah, and she’s an amazing writer, you know she has these incredible and beautiful abstract metaphors. But we wanted to separate our pictures that are Dreams, obviously the more ethereal..
A lot of our photos are.. we try and take people.. I mean everything we’ve ever done are people who want to be models for us. They’re not models we pay, it’s people who want to do it.
And part of the whole thing is, too, that we can all be a little bit vulnerable. And so what we try to do is to create a situation where people are having to be something they’re not
comfortable in being.

So, you know, with a lot of the nightmare stuff it’s pushing people to be emotional.

RC:

Are you using set design, or are you using digital as well as set design with this stuff?

CG:

All of this stuff that you see is .. God, it’s so hard to say. I mean everything has got such a different concept or medium that we use. I mean most of it, the earlier stuff was.. you know, my husband has a background in
make-up effects and so every time we wanted to do a photo shoot, we would talk to him about what we could do, and he would teach us all about different things, different materials we could use. You know, using rigid collodion, and gel effects, that sort of stuff. And so it was all a really exciting process for us. And you know, all of this stuff was low budget, whatever we could find. Definitely its a little bit different
now, Robyn’s married to this awesome lighting guy. I’m looking through and going ‘huh,’ I’m wanting to describe different photos but I don’t even know where to start with that.

I’m looking at Metamorphosis, that was shot with infrared. We went up right after Angeles Forest burnt down. And so we went to this completely burnt out, we took this back road,
and did some hiking and it was freezing. And poor Kat, the model, was completely naked and she’s smoking at that point and she’s breathing out smoke from her lungs.

RC:

Oh wow, see, I looked at that one and I was speculating that it was actually digital and kind of like, stage work just because of the smoke.

CG:

No, she took an inhale of her cigarette and let it go. I mean some of the other stuff like in that same ‘Sphere’ gallery like
Paragon that was.. we painted her white and did some modeling on her body and shot a projector on her.

RC:

Yeah, projectors are, for stuff like that are really amazing.

CG:

So yeah every one of these, especially when it’s just a couple of people working on it, maybe you’ve got somebody to help you with this or that, but for the most part its Robyn and I, so it ends up being days of work.

RC:

So days of editing, and throwing ideas around?

CG:

Well there’s that, but then just building our sets. Doing the makeup effects. Getting thousands of yards of yarn. (laughs)

RC:

Yeah, Which one was that?

CG:

It’s ‘Infected‘

RC:

Is that the one with the chick with all the hair?

CG:

Uh, no, no. That’s actually ‘corazon‘. And the model there, Heather Mcmillan, her hair is made out of basically tons and tons and tons of… you know, an air compressor and a hot glue gun.
So we basically, like using the hot glue gun, we’re making hair. So that took forever but then we had to mottle the storeroom, at the bottom of my basement at the house. And so we had to rip out shelves and repaint it and mottle all the walls, and then paint her. But she had to help us. (Laughs) It took DAYS! (Laughs again) And then she had to sit and model!

RC:

Wow, well she’s a good sport it sounds like.

CG:

Yeah she is, and she’s an amazing painter herself, she’s an incredible painter.

RC:

oh excellent.

CG:

But Robyn is, working with Robyn has just been… she’s a really incredible woman, she produces a lot of the Tool videos. She’s kind of this really well-rounded firecracker.

RC:

And knows a little bit of everybody.

CG:

Yeah, totally. She’s worked in film, she’s worked in photography. Adam really has just the utmost amount of respect for her. She’s a tough cookie.

RC:

Cool, cool, cool. Interesting. Would you want to talk about your video work?

CG:

Well, the stuff that I’ve done, all the video directing for the live shows are something that I’m really proud of.. but that is really so hard. I mean there’s so many artists involved with the live shows that I wouldn’t even know really where to begin.
There’s just so many people involved that create stuff, and my job always was figuring out where all that stuff goes. And, you know, Adam definitely comes up with concepts and art direction and stuff like that. And then, you know, we trigger all that stuff live.

RC:

Yes, it’s something, I didn’t know that. I think it was about six in the morning last night I found that out.

CG:

Yeah, everybody always thinks that it’s like they’re playing to some click track or something. That everything’s perfectly aligned and no, it’s like it changes all the time.

RC:

Yeah yeah, well like I said I saw them three times on this tour, and an intense thing was that I did notice some of the stage effects would be different. And some of the songs and the links and almost jam sessions in a lot of it, and it seemed just real spontaneous almost sometimes.

CG:

Yeah, we started doing that, I mean in the old days we had a system developed for us by this guy Beck Haggardty and he’s the video operator now, and he uses a light console anymore. But in the old days all of the video samples were thrown on a video hard drive and it was all midi triggered.
So I could actually load up sixteen plus video samples per song, and then I’d play them on a keyboard. And I have certain keys that would have different effects, so I could go forward or backward or different kind of effects that we could do, and yeah, we still stick with that same concept.
We don’t use midi any more, we still use video hard drvies, but yeah we use that same concept and we can just do more with it now. The idea of that is so that we can have a show that changes. We can have a show that evolves.

RC:

When you toured with your band Butcher, when you guys did any tours with that, did you use any of these same kind of stage effects?

CG:

We definitely used video. I had like little video mixer with four inputs. But we don’t have the budget for that kind of system. I’d like to some day, it’s definitely a big part of the show, is the video we make for the shows. I mean, I make video for the Butcher show.

RC:

And do you have any videos up anywhere, of the Butcher stuff?

CG:

Yeah, I’d have to do some digging, just because we haven’t played in a while, but there’s definitely stuff.

RC:

Okay, and lastly before we go two things. First what is the symbol on the back of the album?

CG:

That is the Japanese symbol for Butcher.

RC:

Oh killer. And the other thing I noticed, on the elderly lady’s chest, the stones. Do those have a big significance?

CG:

Well, you know, I think ultimately the concept was.. it’s kind of like a holistic approach, it’s kind of a violent image, you know opening your heart up.

RC:

It’s like her rib cage is turned inward..

CG:

Yeah, it’s like her rib cage turned inward, and it’s not spiraling but it’s like it’s moving toward infinity. The pain that you’ve got going on in your life, and how can that become something beautiful. It’s something sacred, the journey.

Select Cuts from Butcher’s album Auricle:


Carousel To Zothyria (edit)


Elements Of Turandot (edit)


Run On Water (edit)

For more, check out these links discussed in the interview:


Adele Mildred


Spiraleyes


Butcher