Patton Goes Long for Fantomas
If fans don’t like the first song on Fantomas’ upcoming third album
Delirium Cordia, they’re out of luck. The
fifty-five-minute disc, which arrives in stores October 21st,
contains only one track.
“It’s my version of ambient music,” says frontman Mike Patton,
of Faith No More and Mr. Bungle fame. “It’s dealing with larger
blocks of sound and putting them together. Mood music, I like to
call it. Obviously we still get around to making a lot of jarring
sounds — there’s a lot of nasty stuff on there but it’s not like
the band is attacking you with a chainsaw. It’s more
seductive.”
Logistical questions regarding the recording of a
fifty-five-minute song abound, with the most obvious being,
how?
“I would pick out a particular section that had a certain
character to it, say, a long rhythmic repetitive drum part with
some whooping cough vocals over the top of that and synth drums,”
says Patton. “We’d divvy it up and chop it up, the way we usually
do, into seventy or eighty little pieces. It’s much more
sample-based. I didn’t want this to sound like a band
recording.”
Similarly, no plans exist to tour and play the album in its
entirety. “I don’t think so,” says Patton. “Some of it is better
left in the studio. I don’t want to drag a wind machine around on
tour. I don’t want to hit some kid in the head with a bull roar.
It’s not appropriate in rock clubs. Maybe cabaret or theater.”
Currently in Kansas for the filming of a movie called
Firecracker, which also stars Debbie Harry and Jane
Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s, Patton has a multitude of projects in the
works, including the follow-up to Delirium Cordia,
tentatively titled Suspended Animation, which he says is
“playful, jumpy, upbeat, with a lot of nursery rhymes,” and
General Patton Vs. The X-ectionuers — an album with
turntablists the X-ecutioners.
But those both will have to wait until Patton’s done playing the
dual roles of a “carnival sideshow owner named Frank” and an
“alcoholic abusive redneck tire store employee named David” in
Firecracker. “They’re both horrible, abusive nasty
characters,” he says. “I figured, ‘Hey, I get to die twice by
getting stabbed and bludgeoned over the head with two different
blunt instruments, and I get to smack a lot of people around — why
not do it?'”