InSoc History: 1993 - Present; "The New Days"
The New Days are, in my mind, the time since I moved InSoc to San Francisco and started working on
"Don't Be Afraid.
InSoc AS A SAN-FRANCISCO GOTH / INDUSTRIAL ACT.
I've received many requests for an explanation of the change in InSoc between the last Tommy Boy release and
"Don't Be Afraid". The reason I have trouble answering is that I never "decided to change". The
music on DBA is pretty much what I've always done on my own. The songs of mine on our previous albums were my attempt to
go with Paul/Tommy Boy's direction. I was able to do it, but not as well as Paul. It never came naturally. I think the
only songs I did in a very "pop" style that worked out well were "Come With Me" and
"Strength" (which was never on an album although it did appear on the
single of "Going Going, Gone".)
HERE is an interview I did around this time.
In June of 1993, I moved to San Francisco with no bandmates, no label, and no manager.
I had been doing music like this for a long time, but never very well. Take this
excerpt from a 1986 instrumental of mine, for example. It was only in about 1990 that I started
to get the hang of actually turning my ideas into decent songs. (A trick that Paul had mastered by about 1981) At first,
it was just instrumentals like "SEEK200" and "Hard Currency". But by
'92, I had begun to be able to put it all together into songs like "Closing In 1.0". It
was clear to me that these songs would never fit into what Paul and I had been doing on Tommy Boy, so I planned for
starting my own project. Instead, I got to take Information Society with me.
Don't Be Afraid, therefore, is not so much a change of styles as it is just what I would have been doing all
along anyway.
Here,
here,
and most importantly, HERE,
are pictures from my porch.
Throughout this period, Jeri Beck of Houston, Texas maintained what started as an InSoc user's group (so to speak) and eventually became a synth-pop genre organization called "Control-Alt-Delete" C-A-D put out (at least) 3 compilation CD's; CatComp 1, CatComp 2, and CatScan.
By January of '96, it had become apparent to me that if I was going to get signed, I was going to have to
make the album first and use it to GET signed. At that time an opportunity came up to do some shows in
Brasil. I spent 6 weeks in Brasil in the spring of '96 and used the money to make Don't Be Afraid.
As I was working on the album with Steve Seibold,
Cleopatra records of Los Angeles
expressed interest in picking up the new album. They released an advance promo single of
"Are 'Friends' Electric?" in January of '97.
The album came out in September of '97.
HERE,
HERE,
HERE,
HERE,
HERE,
HERE and
HERE are a bunch of interviews I did around this time. (Note the simlilarity.
Thank god for e-mail!)
In October of '96, InSoc.org was activated. Since then, I've used it to let people know what was going on with the new album, and to provide people with a way to find out more about the history of the band. In January of '98, this new site went up.
To find out what's happening now, go to the News section of the site.
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