16 VOLT: The Story Behind the Story

By Jeannette Madden
Staff Writer
Talking to Eric Powell, the man behind 16 Volt is amazing. He’s smart, well spoken, and really, really funny. But just getting to him was half the story. We originally set up an interview for a Wednesday afternoon, but I was at my office and had left some of my recording equipment at home.
So we changed the interview to the following Friday evening. Powell called an hour before the interview and asked to move the time to later in the evening so that he could be child-free. I said fine, but when the new time rolled around I had had a few beers (it was a Friday night and by then I was also child-free), so I texted him and asked to move the interview to sometime Saturday, which he agreed to. Unfortunately, later that same evening I dropped my phone in the toilet at the establishment where the beer consumption was taking place. By the time I purchased my new phone the next afternoon, the NHL Playoffs were on, so we all know where my priorities were that night. I was finally able to reach Powell Sunday but he was crammed getting ready to start his “Midi Ghetto Tour,” so we had to wait until Monday at 1 pm to finally talk. My deadline for the story was that same day at noon. And to top it all off, I didn’t know what to expect. I wasn’t familiar with Industrial Music scene and after everything I had put Powell through just to get the interview, I wasn’t even sure if he would take my phone call.

Luckily for me, he took the call and not only did he fill me in on what’s going on in the industrial music scene, he also updated me on 16 Volt and his thoughts regarding the state of the music industry as a whole. According to Powell, industrial music is in “a weird phrase because it’s so split.

There’s sort of like these divisions right now. There’s the rock side and then there’s like the “EBM” [electronic body music] side, so it’s kind of a divided scene. We’re definitely more on the rock side of industrial. A lot of people are starting to use the term “machine rock.” In the 1990’s people also started calling us “cold wave.” When I first started doing this in the late 1980’s, early 1990’s, there weren’t all of these divisions. It was basically just called industrial. And I don’t know, maybe I’m just an old guy now but I prefer that more than all of these sort of sub-genres. I think it hurts everybody, really. It’s gotten to the point now where if you’re an EBM fan then you just won’t listen to anything that isn’t EBM and that’s too bad. You’re missing out on some cool music. I don’t care…I’ll listen to everything from Alanis Morissette to Metallica, if it’s cool music it’s cool music.”

Although Powell is literally known as “16 Volt,” he creates the music with Mike Peoples, the bass player for 16 Volt’s live shows. “We work together.”

Powell said. “He does a lot of guitar riffs and bass riffs. He lives in Los Angeles and I live in Portland so he ends up sending stuff to me via email or uploading it. We write very ‘future style.’ We don’t sit in a rehearsal studio and say ‘Hey dude, let’s jam until something comes up.’ I started my career in recording engineering—I went to recording engineering school so I come from the production standpoint more than the musician standpoint. I’ll take some riffs he’s written or some riffs I’ve written and we try to grab the hookiest stuff and we start assembling things. We start right off the bat in Pro Tools, so from the first thing that’s dropped in there we’re already mixing and tweaking sounds and it’s a process of building and tweaking on top of that. It’s a lame cliché and everybody seems to have used it but it’s a lot like painting, where you start with that little spark and then you add layers and layers until we go ‘that’s enough’ or ‘that’s too much.’ We start off with the structure early on and we’ve always tried to maintain a traditional pop structure. We’re a fan of songs more than a fan of sounds so we like to keep our stuff in that sort of a ‘normal’ style, the intro – verse – chorus – breakdown – chorus – kind of thing.”
One difference on 16 Volt’s last release, “American Porn Songs,” was that Powell included a song written by Scott Robison, the first time a song not written by Powell and/or Peoples has made an album. “He’s a friend of ours that I’ve probably known for close to a decade.” Powell explained. “We always talked about doing stuff and it was like a couple of years that we were working pretty closely together. He helped with a lot of ‘FullBlackHabit’, my last record, and I like to work with different people to get different perspectives on things, especially now that I write it, record it, mix it, edit it, produce it. It’s nice to get some other ideas that aren’t just from my head. So, it’s fun to work with other people and grab some inspiration from them.”
I asked Powell to tell me about 16 Volt’s new album to be released in May, “American Porn Songs Remix,” along with the ‘Midi-Ghetto Tour’ kicking off April 30 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and hitting the VFW in Fargo May 5. A few years back, Powell didn’t seem too keen on the idea of remixes so I was curious to know what had changed his mind. First he addressed the tour…“On the tour with us is ChemLab, and you know they’ve been around forever, and Jared [Louche], he’s like an icon in our little scene here. Opening is a great band from Vancouver, Canada, Left Spine Down. They’re sort of ‘featuring’ Jeremy from Front Line Assembly and they’re up and coming, a little bit more punk rock mixed w/industrial-style stuff.”
Powell then talked about the remix. “It comes out May 11. It’s funny because we’ve never done a remix record. I thought they were kind of cheesy but we had a lot of cool friends that wanted to do it. We went back to what are we doing this for, why are we doing it, let’s get back to the reasons we started doing it, and most of all, let’s try and figure out what the future of music is, with all of the labels collapsing, and start trying to give people more than they are getting. So one way we’re trying to bridge the gap between fans and musicians with this record is we took all of our remix kits and we gave them out to name artists that have been around for a long time doing great things on a larger scale than us and then we gave those same things to our fans. The idea was, if you do a cool remix, we’re going to stick you right next to Tim Skold and we’re not going to say ‘hey - this guy’s a remix winner’ you know? Here’s a fan, a nonprofessional musician, like they’re just another person mixing the songs. It’s sort of what we would have wanted and how can we give that to people.

That’s sort of like our mantra now…we’re doing this primarily because we love it and how can we make it cooler for the fans than let’s just buy the record from a faceless company…”

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If You Go

What: 16 Volt, Structural Interference
Where: VFW Upstairs
When: Wed, May 5
Info: 701.235.8243