ERP: Before we start off, could you say what?s going on in Autodidact/Monotremata?s universe now?

RKF: Monotremata Records is on an indefinite hiatus of sorts thanks to the hideous economy -- there are no plans to release anything new in the near future, although the existing catalog continues to be available. Autodidact is very, very busy lately -- Crucial Blast will release WAVE TRANSMISSIONS FROM THE SULTAN OF CRAWL in the near future, and there are two other albums in the can that will most likely end up being released on Public Eyesore (DEATH IS MY HEADLESS CHINA DOLL, a "lost" album that was recorded several years ago, and the more recent DEVOTIONAL HYMNS FOR THE WOMEN OF ANU). In addition, I am currently knee-deep in recording sessions for REAP THE BLACK HARVEST, which will hopefully come out sometime next year, ideally on Crucial Blast.

ERP: Not going deeply into a matter of Autodidact sound description, we can just say you play a sort of background music. I wonder why the guitar, not the moog synthesizer for example, is the core of your music? I guess, you have started as a guitar playert?

RKF: Yes, I am definitely a guitarist and not a keyboard player. :) I don't even own a keyboard, and my keyboard skills are rudimentary at best. Given that my guitars are often mistaken for keyboards, there's not much point in owning one. A lot of Autodidact's songs can definitely function as background music, but some of it is much more song-like... it varies from album to album (and even within albums, from track to track). The main constants in Autodidact's sounds are trancelike repetition, drone, and equal amounts of harmonic sound and dissonance.

ERP: The only record by Autodidact I have is ?The Blooming of one Hundred Shotguns?, recorded between 1999 and 2000. Is it representative for the current style of yours? What?s changed since that time?

RKF: That's hard to say, because every Autodidact album has been very different from the previous one, although the basic elements (repetition, drone, dissonance, etc.) remain largely the same. SHOTGUNS is an anomaly in the Autodidact catalog because it was never really intended to be released, and it was constructed in a very different manner from all the others -- one of the songs (the first one) is actually a number of wildly different recordings all pieced together with additional guitars to make it all flow as one piece, two songs ("like a baby carved from stone" and "the forest, filled with wolves") are actually reconfigurations of material from early Autodidact cassette recordings, and the last two were recorded around the time I was fooling around with all of this material. The entire album's sound is heavily influenced by the fact that I had just purchased a Nanoverb (reverb efx unit), which was probably used a bit more heavily than it should have been. :)

The two songs that were pieced together from old material were nothing but an experiment that was directly influenced by the Swans album SOUNDTRACKS FOR THE BLIND, which made a huge impression on me around the same time. I decided to take some of the "best" parts from early Autodidact cassettes, from dozens of different songs, and run them together in different combinations to see what happened. Those two songs are interesting, but the process was so laborious that I'm not sure I'll do it again.

ERP: The record consists with songs which veer from song-like tracks to austere noise/ambient textures. How would you explain that diversity?

RKF: I'm easily bored. :) More seriously, I'm heavily influenced by psychedelic music (Angel'in Heavy Syrup is one of my all-time favorite bands), and I like the way a lot of psychedelia shifts from one musical mood to another within a song. Standard verse/chorus/verse songs kind of bore me a lot of the time. I tend to be more interested in the actual sound of guitars and other instruments as opposed to what they're actually playing, particularly when I'm in an ambient mood, and that's certainly true of SHOTGUNS more than almost anything I've done before or since. One of the biggest influences on my guitar playing is the Band of Susans -- they were contemporaries of Swans, from New York, who released many brilliant albums from about 1985-1995, and they specialized in giant sheets of guitar sound generated by three guitars, and Autodidact basically wouldn't exist if they hadn't been there first.

ERP: My CD recorder displays 5 instead of 9 listed on the record cover tracks. Would you like to solve this riddle?

RKF: Ah, this is because Bryan at Public Eyesore made a wee boo-boo on the cover. The first track is "the blooming of one hundred shotguns" and the four that follow on the track listing are actually sections (movements) in that one song. The second actual song is "like a baby carved from stone," and the rest of the track listing is correct.

ERP: Let me focus on that noise/ambient aspect of your creative force. The artists you?d greatly correspond with were very motivated in doing their trancey, looped and droning music, for example M.B. wanted to express his own traumas, Maeror Tri were much into mental disease issues, and Theatre of Eternal Music made mind trips. Does Autodidact have a conceptual superstructure for its music?

RKF: Not really, although Autodidact's aesthetic is probably somewhere between Maeror Tri and the Theater of Eternal Music... well, maybe. I have a somewhat strange, black sense of humor that's occasionally reflected in the titles, and lyrically (some of the other albums feature songs with lyrics from time to time) I favor cryptic and obscure retellings of world events and/or fictional tales. Some people have described Autodidact's sound as claustrophobic, which I would agree with, and most of the releases have strong overtones of darkness and paranoia. Probably the cornerstone of Autodidact's aesthetic, from day one, is the concept that all things are capable of being both tremendously beautiful and exceptionally ugly at the same time -- it all depends on your perspective. Plus I really like dissonance.

ERP: The length of tracks and a mind absorbing, static and waving sounds suggest you want to interact with a listener?s brain waves?

RKF: There's some truth to that. I greatly favor music that's hypnotizing, although part of the reason a lot of the tracks are lengthy is simply due to their slowness: Autodidact rarely plays above 60 bpm, and quite often as slow as 20 bpm. Drum tracks at 20 bpm take a long time to play out. :) Incidentally, nearly all Autodidact songs start with drum tracks, although many times the final mix has no drums at all (which is mostly the case on SHOTGUNS).

ERP: In your biographical note there?s a line that emphasizes a role of discipline in your music. It?s quite amazing because there?s a strong tendency in music to have an artistic liberty, and play a free music?

RKF: The discipline part comes in playing elements over and over with as little variation as possible in perfect time -- that, and actually getting things done efficiently. Discipline is how Autodidact, in only seven years, with only one full-time player, has managed to record approximately twenty full-length cassettes and nearly a dozen cds of original music. (How good all of that music is remains in debate.) At the same time, however, I tend to let the sound go where it wants, and while all of Autodidact's sounds are definitely controlled -- very little of Autodidact's sound is by accident -- it's also largely improvised. I push the record button and play and if it sounds okay when I play it back, I leave it; if it doesn't, I record the track over again in its entirety. Given the length of some of the songs, discipline becomes necessary to keep the guitar lines machine-like. Oddly enough, SHOTGUNS is probably the most "free" Autodidact release in years (the early cassette releases, some of which were recorded with no beat at all, are considerably less "disciplined").

ERP: Do you recycle, manipulate or prepare your music? I mean, how much your music is overdubbed?

RKF: It depends on which era of Autodidact we're talking about. Early cassette material was heavily influenced by Skullflower and K.K. Null and tended to drone more than anything else, and back then anything was fair game -- I recorded the guitars in a wide variety of ways, added in found sounds and noises from non-musical instruments, etc. A drum track on one song from that era, "the black hand of fate," was actually created by stuffing a microphone between the mattresses of my bed and whacking on the bed with a stick -- that was pretty representative of my unorthodox tactics for generating sounds at the time. Back then the only guitar involved was a cheap Stratocaster copy. Since then I've accumulated a sizeable pile of guitar efx boxes, more guitars, and a Line 6 POD (a direct box / amp simulator), and the recording methods have become a bit more consistent. For the last several years I've been playing everything on a Fender Telecaster tuned to a strange, minimalist variant of C tuning, and I just vary the efx boxes in use and the amp settings from track to track. More recently I've begun using a bass guitar as well in addition to the many, many guitars.

There have been three "drummers" in Autodidact's history -- a cheap one by Boss (aka The Ubiquitous Mr. Thud), a better one with a bass synth (aka The Ice Queen Esmeralda), and the current favorite, an Alesis SR-16 (aka Doktor Omega). The one on SHOTGUNS is Esmeralda; she made her last appearance on WAVE TRANSMISSIONS and has since retired, for the time being anyway. Eventually real drums will make an appearance, just as soon as I learn to play them without cringing at my total lack of skill. I still occasionally drag out Mr. Thud and run him through efx boxes to create exquisitely hideous noise beats.

ERP: And now, these song-not-song forms of your music? Are they side effects of your guitar textures, or have an equal importance in your output?

RKF: The textures often dictate what happens next. More than anything else, the beat dictates what the guitars are going to do, and then as the guitars start piling up they create sub-rhythms and textures of their own that become interesting to play off of. I tend to favor jumping from intensely harmonic or melodic moments to wildly dissonant ones, and where and when that happens depends entirely on the guitar layers and the tones they generate. The songs rarely end up sounding in finished form the way I had originally imagined them -- they tend to grow and mutate while being constructed.

ERP: I guess, they?re much easier to play alive, because they sound like a guitar jamming with a head high up in clouds, while noise/ambient music it?s a matter of studio work ?

RKF: Playing these songs live has always been problematic because there are too many guitars and the parts are either too minimalist (and thus boring to the average guitarist) or too repetitive or too dissonant, so finding others to play with has always been a problem. If I had like-minded people playing along, we could probably recreate the general sound without too much trouble -- the actual songs I'm not so sure about. Autodidact, for these reasons, has so far only played live a handful of times. I'd like to assemble a band and have a go at doing it more often, but we'll see if that actually happens.

ERP: Do you have much ideas that don?t fit into Autodidact?s profile? What happens to them?

RKF: I actually play in three bands at the moment: Autodidact, Korperschwache, and UNHOLYDEATHMACHINE. Korperschwache, which has been running as long as Autodidact, is essentially Autodidact's evil noise twin -- loud, highly dissonant white-noise guitar soundscapes designed to make your teeth ache. If you have heard of a band called Sunn O))) (who are heavily influenced by Earth and Merzbow, just as Korperschwache is influenced by these bands and other Japanese noisemakers like Null, Jojo Hiroshige, Solmania, Aube, etc.), their most recent album sounds very much like Korperschwache, only better-recorded. The other band, UNHOLYDEATHMACHINE, is a more recent collaboration between myself and drummer Todd Watson (also of Doppleganger), and in that context we are developing actual songs somewhere in the territory of noise / doom metal to be played live. As with Autodidact and Korperschwache, UDM is very, very loud.

I try to keep the three separate and distinct, although some early Autodidact material could pass for Korperschwache and vice versa. Korperschwache, however, has never had vocals or beats, although the forthcoming release on Crucial Blast, SORDID REVELATIONS FROM THE CULT OF THE NAZARENE, will be the first to have vocals (courtesy of Elektra Sturmschnell from Sweden). UNHOLYDEATHMACHINE is largely just live acoustic drums and one guitar (a very loud Epiphone Les Paul copy, very evil-sounding) and lots of shouting.

I've also collaborated with various people over the years in bands / duets like Chinahauz, Cervical Third, and more recently with Bryan Day (of Sistrum, who also runs Public Eyesore).

ERP: Does music you don?t like inspire you anyhow because it makes you aware of what you should avoid? Any examples?

RKF: I definitely don't want to have anything to do with nu-metal. :) It is true that some forms of music make me think "Yes, I want to avoid ever sounding like this." I've never been terribly fond of punk bands (even though I like their energy and attitude) because they're sloppy, and in general sloppy music turns me off. I was raised on a steady diet of country and folk, then later metal (particularly technical metal) and psychedelia, before starting to play guitar seriously, and I'm very much influenced by the idea of meeting a certain level of technical proficiency. "Free" playing is all well and good, but I like to be able to follow the beat, even if the beat's only implied. (I make an exception for experimental guitar music, where the sounds are more important than structures or beats anyway.)

I also don't like music that's heavily drenched in keyboards very much, which is kind of interesting since everybody seems to think Autodidact has keyboards in it. More than anything else, I prefer music made with guitars, preferably loud guitars. I'm not a big fan of techno (even though I released a quasi-ambient techno record by DR:OP:FR:AM+E on Monotremata) in general because of their overwhelming reliance on cheesy keyboard sounds. Outside of that there's very little I wouldn't listen to or be influenced by, though. At the moment I'm really partial to black metal, an influence that started to show up on ANU and will probably be very prominent on HARVEST.

ERP: How bright points are Austin and Texas on the music map of the States?

RKF: There's a lot happening here, although the city's coverage of the music scene is pretty myopic -- to judge from the local music coverage, you would think that Austin (and Texas in general) is dominated by almost nothing but roots rock, country, and (to a lesser degree) punk music. But there is a huge underground experimental scene here, encompassing bands and artists like Josh Ronsen, ST37, Charmbrilades, Tia Carrera, Jnortham/Mgriznich, and many more, and a large but almost unnoticed stoner-rock scene (with bands like Southern Gun Culture, Mala Suerte, Superheavygoatass, Activator, Hognose, and many more). There is probably a wider variety of bands to see and hear in this city than anywhere else in the world outside of New York, Chicago, and some places in Europe and Japan. I like it. :)

ERP: If there?s anything left to say, do it now!

RKF: If someone overseas would like to put out Autodidact and / or Korperschwache releases, I'd sure like to know about it. :) The one other thing I haven't mentioned yet is that I recently acquired a KORG D1600 digital 16-track mixer for the moon unit three studio (where all Autodidact and Korperschwache material is recorded), which should allow me to greatly improve the sound of subsequent releases, beginning with the new album in progress. I'm also open to collaborating more with like-minded artists, whether it be in person or by mail. And I'd like to say thanks for the show of interest -- I hope to continue releasing strange, exotic sounds for many years to come....