i think most people are familiar with the converter story so far, but could you give us a brief history of the project, and how you ended up signed to ant-zen?

i started work on converter material almost immediately after i had finished recording the second pain station album, disjointed. i'd wanted to start sooner than that, but i worked on disjointed up until the last minute before it was recorded. i had been getting into many of the acts on ant-zen and i was really inspired by those bands and it helped me decide which direction my new side project, converter, would head. once i got probably 7 or 8 tracks written, i contacted stefan alt and asked him if i could send him a demo of the material. i thought ant-zen would be a great label for converter to call home. after a while, maybe a month or so, i heard back from stefan and he was interested in signing converter.

i'm sure a lot of people like the metal packaging for the shock front cd. how did this layout come about? what level of input did you have in its development?

the only input i had in the creation of the shock front layout was basically just a final approval of the artwork and concept. i gave stefan 100% creative freedom on it because, to be honest, i think his work is absolutely brilliant. it's as simple as that. i had no specific ideas myself and was curious as to how he'd visually interpret the music, so i left it completely up to him and it paid off.

you seem to have struck a bit of popularity with shock front in germany, like your charting in bodystyler, etc. did that come as a surprise, or where you confident in ant-zen's promotional methods?

yeah, it came as a complete surprise, actually. in the year or so that i had been working on converter material, i only had feedback from a few people who were at all familiar with the whole power noise / industrial genre, so i really had no idea what kind of reaction the album would get. as for ant-zen's promotional methods, i hadn't really seen any evidence of it other than ads here or there in a couple magazines, so i didn't know what to expect from that end either.

also, you seem to have generated an even bigger buzz within certain sections of the online community, even more so than the print media. what is your view on that?

i think that makes sense, as i've spent some time promoting myself online over the last few years. none of the labels i've been with yet have been either willing or able to do much promotion in print, so it's logical that i'd get a bit more attention via the internet.

i know ant-zen does not usually license discs for release in the north america, presumably because they already have strong distribution here, but has the concept of licensing shock front come up at all?

not to my knowledge. i'm not sure that stefan is all that comfortable with licensing material to other labels, as it can mean handing over control to a label who may not promote the material in the best way possible for both the band's and label's sake. i guess it could still happen, but i haven't heard anything about it.

in regard to pain station, with disjointed, a lot of the press material from cop talked about pain station being an existentialist project. would you agree with this labeling, or is it merely a buzz word picked due to track titles like "anxiety?"

well, i suppose i could agree to an extent, but that sort of makes it sound a tad deeper than it probably is in reality. but hell, if it helps people sleep at night to refer to it as such, it's fine with me.

let's talk about cold for a bit. how did the idea of a concept album come about?

sort of by accident. i had written and recorded a few tracks before the idea even entered my mind. it seemed to me that the themes in these few tracks could fit together and that the characters in each could easily be the same guy... a guy depressed, questioning the worth of his existence who finds himself slipping into a sort of dreamworld, not sure what's real and what isn't. he tries to get help only to find those he cares about don't share his feelings. he eventually snaps, killing a loved one, finds he enjoys the feeling and ends up going on a bit of a killing spree before eventually killing himself after he realizes what he's become. so i began to fill in the pieces that i thought were missing, creating the transitions this guy goes through from song to song as he experiences this breakdown from beginning to end, without going too indepth. some of what's contained in these tracks lyrically is autobiograph-ical to an extent, and i'd have to say that a lot of the music is something i've "felt" recently as well. i just worked this in with what i wanted this character to feel and combined the two, sort of translating how i thought i'd feel in his situation.

what was it like working on cold completely by yourself, where as with disjointed you had tom muschitz as a producer, and various guest lyricists?

it was great. as much as i enjoyed recording with tom, i was on a mission to do this one myself from the beginning, especially as the album became more and more a part of me. i had already been recording all of my converter material and recent pain station remixes i'd done for other bands by myself anyway, so i thought i'd try recording cold solo too. i still don't have an "ear" for production at all, so i'll be referring to cold as being "unproduced." maybe it doesn't sound so great productionwise, but that's also part of the rawness in the emotion of the album.

from pre-release reviews of the material, i gather that cold is much darker and more ambient, and less aggressive and distorted, than disjointed. is this a result of the natural flow of the music, or do you feel that converter now provides a sufficient output for your more di storted material?

yeah, i was going to make a conscious effort to seperate the two projects more, possibly lessening the distortion on the new pain station material. as it turns out, i let the music lead me, rather than me leading it, so the fact that it's maybe less distorted and more ambient is just something that happened. i think there are songs that are every bit a aggressive as tracks on disjointed, but it's a much more subtle aggression, maybe less physical. i think a lot of people who loved disjointed for its energy may be a bit disappointed with the fact that cold lacks a lot of that raw power that, but cold is a different album in many respects and, i think, much more cerebral than disjointed. where disjointed was me on the verge of an explosion, cold is me on the verge of a breakdown.

i've heard that cop has feels the initial version of cold is not "dancey" enough. any truth to this?

uh... yeah, actually. i might as well get this out in the open now. cop likes what i do, but disjointed suffered when being promoted to clubs, which i guess is cop's main means of promotion, so they asked that i remedy the problem of the somewhat slow tempo of cold by adding one or two more club-friendly tracks. from a business standpoint i understood this, but from a creative standpoint i was pretty miffed, as i felt cold was a complete story from start to finish and to just add a dance track for the sake of having a dance track on the album would interrupt both the flow of the album and the storyline.

what do you intend to do about this?

i found a compromise i could live with. tom shear of assemlage 23 had been working on a couple remixes for one of the album tracks for a while, one of them a very clubby remix, so i added it to the end of the album because i didn't feel it compromised the album's integrity since the remixes are basically add-ons after the story has been told, if that makes any sense. as well, i added a converter remix that i had done of one of the tracks. that one's not clubby in a traditional sense, but i think it could garner some play anyway. these tracks would have needed to be released eventually anyway. i just sped up the process a bit. plus, i think they're good remixes and add something to the final product. i do want to get club play and i have no problem writing dancier tracks as long as the context doesn't interfere with the concept. with this, maybe people will understand why a23's remix is called the "slut mix."