If you havent heard about Feeding fingers, you defintley should! They will be playing the worlds biggest gothic/industrial festival next year. This interview offers a deep inside look into the mind,the world and music of Justin Curfman, front man of Feeding Fingers.
Before starting the band, what where you doing?
Justin-Hi, Catee. Thanks for having me here. Before starting Feeding Fingers, I was directing most of my creative efforts toward stop-motion puppet animation, sequential art, and literature. I produced and directed three animated short puppet films (”Zugskin” – 2003, “Tephrasect” – 2004, “Platelets: Lepidopteraphage” – 2005), published a graphic novel titled, “Expiration Date” (2005) with my former creative partner and illustrator, Niki Price, published a chapter book of grotesques titled, “Catalog of Absurdity #1″ (2003), and was writing and recording music since age 14, without ever really intending to start a band – most of this music found its way into Feeding Fingers’ first album, “Wound in Wall” (2007). I was also painting, dabbling in sculpture, burning the varnish off of decorative squirrel sculptures, drilling holes into their stomachs, installing red LED into them, and filling them with smoke cartridges intended for toy trains.
In your own words could you please describe your music to us?
Justin-For me, our music sounds like a musical illustration of my dreams and pre-occupations with everything from missing children, entomophagy, drowning, sex, duality, teeth, fencing masks, vestigial organs, etc. I would like to think that our music sounds like a near-accurate soundtrack for my unconscious life. I am not a very subjective writer – I am generally not interested in that or in direct narrative. I prefer to think and write about impossible lives and situations that excite me. This is the closest that I am able to get to semi-directly experiencing and sharing with others my internal rationale and personal logic for certain things – excluding my animation work. I have never attemptedto seek a genre or market to sort of burrow into – I don’t think that many people do.
What influences you to write music?
Justin-My answer to this recurring question is ever-changing and a struggle for me. I think that in the past, most especially on our first album, “Wound in Wall”, what I was most influenced by was a general disinterest in my environment at the time and previously. In my formative years, leading up to “Wound in Wall”, I just generally had very little interest in direct contact with people or the physical world around me. I grew up in a very violent and isolated environment and used my imagination, in retrospect, as a retreat, and as a result, I tended to not care much for social interaction and exploration. It wasn’t that I felt it impossible to talk to people and all of this – and I wasn’t some sniveling little cry baby or any of that nonsense. I wouldn’t call myself a terribly shy person. I just had a preference for processing the world around me and manipulating sounds, words, imagery, and other elements into these little self-absorbed pieces of music, art, animation, literature, and all of this. Few things on their own merit of existence have really ever touched me. I often have to process some things through my own personal logic to make something touch me. Otherwise, I generally have no interest. I like listening to people talk to me and rearranging their words and making little phrases out of them when their conversations are of no consequence, for example. It isn’t that I don’t listen to anyone, it’s just that most things that people tend to say, I feel, are more or less, a spewing of a permutation of marketing slogans and influence from years and years of bad television melodramas, sitcoms, general mass media, video games, music, and the internet. Sadly, I think, the idea of personal identity has really been replaced by a collective homogeny of acceptance and approval. But, for me, there is some relief to be had in re-arranging this nonsense into other forms of nonsense that are a little more pleasurable and may also give some delight and joy to our listeners.
But, as of late, I feel that personal experience and true life recollection and introspection has been creeping into Feeding Fingers’ music, both musically and lyrically, more than it did in the past. I find myself taking more of an active interest and active role with others and taking in my environment at face-value and critiquing a bit more, rather than pureeing it and discarding it. However, I don’t feel that the new material is a total push away from was captured on “Wound in Wall” and “Baby Teeth”. I don’t make conscious decisions to write to for someone something. But, I do find myself stepping away from the old safe elements of imagination that I used to obsess over and intellectually masturbate to. There is a little more of a marriage of reality and imagination in the new material. But, don’t worry, I am not going the singer/songwriter route to bore the piss out of you all.
What is your songwriting process like?
Justin-Generally, I get a series of tones in my mind that illustrate an image or a feeling that I have. Usually it’s one part and it repeats in my mind – a motif or sorts. I think this is probably apparent when you listen to either album, thus the repetition in a lot of the work – somewhat minimalist in places. In most of the songs, there tends to be some recurring element throughout – be it with percussion, guitar, keys, or whatever.
When I find this “element”, I usually write a bass part underneath it, to give it more presence, fluidity, and movement. This is followed usually by percussion. Then, I usually disperse guitar parts and keys throughout, bearing in mind that I have to be able to sing and perform this live with just myself and Kris (bass / keys) and Danny (percussion) – so therein often lies a little bit of an arrangement challenge.
Lyrics are always last and most time-consuming. As I said, I am not very capable of writing subjectively – I’m not Bruce Springsteen or someone of that ilk. I don’t think often in words or issues when dealing with music. I like to write music first and let the music tell me what it’s saying in my head, and then I give to it words and melody to help express to the listener in a more literal way what these tones are telling me to say (even if it’s “… laminated scrambled eggs…”), so that the listener is not left in the dark with just boring, self-absorbed, instrumental pieces. Most often, I have music and I listen to it over and over hundreds of times and just sing what is essentially nonsense over it, just to find a melody that works. I then go back and listen to the jumbled mess of words and try to piece together what it is that I am trying to communicate to myself and to the outside.
Can you tell me a little bit about your upcoming cd?
Justin-The new album is to be titled, “Detach Me From My Head”. The title track, “Detach Me From My Head” is available to listen to online, as a matter of fact at feedingfingers.com and the obligatory MySpace and Facebook pages.
This will be Feeding Fingers’ third full length album. As of now, January 2010, the album is about 85% complete. I do not have a specific release date yet. I expect it to be released in late summer or early autumn 2010 through Stickfigure Recordings, A Distant Sound, Tephramedia, and whatever other (preferably European) label support we garner for it.
I think, musically, “Detach Me From My Head”, might step back a little bit more into “Wound in Wall” territory, with a little more variety in tone and mood than what we had done with “Baby Teeth”, which was much more dense than anything that we had ever done, and maybe too monochromatic in some ways. I also think that “Detach Me From My Head” is a bit different from the other two based also on the fact that we have a new bass player – Kris Anderson. Though I write all of the music for Feeding Fingers, Kris has offered a different dynamic and influence to the group that has been quite liberating for me. I am working with two people that have total faith in what I do. I am very fortunate to have them.
I am also working with some production support from legendary radio host, Coyote J. Battan and also with some assistance and critical guidance from THE Thomas Dolby, which humbles me to no end. We also have a new manager, David Nunez, who has helped us so much here in the USA and elsewhere that I can’t thank the man enough. For a while there, I was getting pretty overwhelmed with taking care of all of the creative responsibilities and the ugly administrative end of Feeding Fingers. David approached us, took over and has done some really amazing work for the group.
What is the meaning behind your music?
Justin-I don’t know that I understand yet. There is definitely some self-investigation to be left for me to figure out how much of this is ego-satisfaction, how much of this is general entertainment, and how much of this is really important to my well-being and identity. How much of this is obsessive compulsive disorder? I don’t understand fully yet.
What does the name “Feeding fingers,” stand for?
Justin-The name of the band comes from the lyrics of the song, “Feeding Fingers”, on our first album, “Wound in Wall”.
I once dreamt that I was exploring a section of woods behind my childhood home. I came upon a little girl, wearing a white dress. She was faceless and she sat on a high-chair. She had a xylophone across her lap. She couldn’t speak, but I knew that in my brain, literally, was a piece of music that she wanted to play on her xylophone. She telepathically commanded that I sit under her xylophone and under her feet. She reached into a pocket on her dress and she removed a knife from it. She then reached down and sawed the top of my head off, exposing my brain. She then took off her socks and shoes and placed her feet into my brain, as if soaking and massaging her feet in a warm tub of water. She felt the wrinkles in my brain between her toes, and she absorbed the piece of music through her feet by osmosis. She then proceeded to play the song.
I woke up from the dream and hummed the tune to myself all day, and finally recorded it. That song is recorded note for note on “Wound in Wall” in the song “Feeding Fingers”, but the lyrics themselves are about the girl being duplicated into a dozen or so and showing up in another dream that came not long after her first appearance. All of the girls stand single-file and wait to put their fingers into small holes drilled into a perfect white wall in a perfectly white room, where behind the wall is a starving man waiting to eat their fingers. In this room, in this dream, I was a victim too.
This girl makes an appearance in most of my work, for some reason. I am not sure what significance there is. She just is.
I have heard you will be playing Gothic Treffen, which is one of the
biggest Industrial/gothic festivals in the world. What are the feelings behind playing this festival?
Justin-I think that it is good for the group to take these steps toward the possibility of removing Feeding Fingers from the confines of this American music market, to be honest with you. Unfortunately, in America, I feel, the majority of people have to have their art, entertainment, music, or just cultural experience in general, specifically marketed and packaged for them to fit their tribal identity – their demographic. Otherwise, they will typically not be receptive to much anything outside of their affiliation – Feeding Fingers finds itself in a bit of a marginalization problem in America because of this. We get lumped into this whole “Goth” thing here, which has a negative stigma – deservedly so, I have to admit, because of the general pretentiousness associated with it, and the imbecilic and stereotypical imagery and marketing / promotional nonsense that goes along with it. Do we really need to see more sculptures in a cemetery crying red or black tears or some other such crap? We’re not a part of this. Granted, there are obvious tonal similarities that Feeding Fingers has to bands like The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshess, Joy Division, and on and on – but none of that is really en vogue or much in the contemporary taste here right now.
With that, I feel, a large festival, such as WGT, where thousands of people come that are AWARE of the fact that this “genre” has its many sub-genres, like anything else, Feeding Fingers might find a more receptive audience of more discriminating listeners.
To be able to play with people like Peter Murphy, Clan of Xymox, Cranes, etc. that have a little more credibility and are not just some silly group of kids wearing black lipstick and complaining about political systems that they don’t understand, or worse – is a nice change of pace.
In other words, yep… I’m looking forward to it. We all are.
So far in your career as a musician, what has been the best experience?
Justin:It might sound cliché, but, I have to admit that the best experience that I have had is in witnessing the effect that creating something, anything really, and sharing it with people on a larger level… like releasing an album, performing for people, organizing shows, etc., etc. and working creatively with people on music videos and other projects has on myself and those that I meet and work with. It interests me to see how having a dream about smashing a firefly’s glowing torso and smearing it’s glowing entrails on someone’s face before kissing them and setting it to music and giving it to people and talking with and interacting with them based on something as simple as that and developing relationships around little nuggets of influence and curiosity to make something other than art entirely, for example. Not knowing who you will touch, or how, or why – and how I or Kris, or Danny, or whomever might react (or not) and where those things might lead – good or not so good… interacting with people that I otherwise would have never known existed if not for some songs, or vice versa, has been a real pleasure for me. The dead goat in a plastic bag was nice too.
Why should people listen to your band?
Justin-Because I am not a very good employee.
Justin-thank you!
Thank you!
To listen to these guys go to http://www.myspace.com/thefeedingfingers
He’s just simply so hot!