Godflesh

Godflesh: "Imperator" (via SoundCloud)

Justin Broadrick has been an active musician since his teenage years, but unlike your average high school punk with a resume featuring bands nobody remembers, he'd joined and left Napalm Death by the time he was 16. And he’d started even earlier that that, founding the electronic-focused Final when he was 13 and, a year later, hooking up with Fall of Because, co-founded by future Godflesh partner G.C. Green.

Over the years, Broadrick's kept busy—he played in GOD, Scorn, Head of David, and in the “supergroup” Greymachine with members of Isis and Jesu, and has recorded solo material as Pale Sketcher, Techno Animal, and JK Flesh. He's best known, though, for co-founding industrial metal heroes Godflesh in 1988 with aforementioned childhood friend G.C. Green and for his longstanding, increasingly airy Jesu, which he founded in 2003 after Godflesh called it quits in 2002.

For people of a certain age, Jesu is probably the first act they associate with Broadrick, but the new Godflesh album should shift that a bit. After reforming in 2010 with Green for some live Godflesh shows (including a co-headlining set with fellow lifers Swans at Supersonic Festival in Birmingham), the duo are back with their pummeling drum machine. They recently released a very solid EP, Decline & Fall, and are about to put out a truly great LP, A World Lit Only by Fire (out 10/7 on the band's own Avalanche Recordings). For these new efforts, they’ve returned to their roots—specifically 1988’s Godflesh EP, 1989’s Streetcleaner, and 1992’s Pure—while also expanding upon what they did best.

Broadrick's trajectory is similar to that of Michael Gira: both remained so active with various projects over the years that when a "reunion" or "reboot" was announced it didn't seem surprising. And, like Swans, Godflesh are making music that stands with, and at times goes beyond, their seminal material. Unlike Gira, though, Broadrick’s not quite an elder statesman: Because he got started so long ago, and has been in the public eye all that time, you'd assume he's in his 60s, but when I caught up with him via Skype, he was just about to turn 45. We spoke about the new record, the state of Godflesh, and things in general in 2014.

Pitchfork: You’re turning 45. You've been making music for so long, via all your different projects, that 45 seems incredibly young to me.

Justin K Broadrick: When I first started making music, for about the first 10 years, I was always the young kid. Everyone referred to me as such in any band. When I joined Head of David, the other guys, apart from the bass player who was two years older than me, were, like, 27. They were 10 years older than me. And then with Godflesh, Ben is five years older than me, so I've always been the kid.

Then when I hit 30, it's been a fucking downward spiral into being an old man ever since. Now I get referred to as an old dude. I remember meeting some people in my mid-20s who were having conversations about that and they were, like, "Hold on, you were in Napalm Death when you were 15? Shit, I was still fuckin' playing with toys." It's like, I was as well! I saw someone the other day and we were talking about Michael Gira's age. He’s how old now?

Pitchfork: He’s 60.

JKB: Wow. That gives hope for us all.

Pitchfork: I honestly think the music he's making now is the best he's ever made.

JKB: For my own tastes, it's quite controversial, but I can't even listen to Swans anymore. It doesn't do it for me at all, but I absolutely adore the early records and, on that same token, I wouldn't in any way wish for them to come back and repeat themselves. It's just not to my taste what they do, but I absolutely admire and respect the band. Whether I like the records that they make now or not is immaterial. They're such an impact on my life when I was young that I'm really happy they exist and really happy they're popular.

Pitchfork: Why did you decide to return to Godflesh? I know you started to play shows before you recorded new material. What was the reason behind the decision to play shows again and then to release new music?

JKB: The whole focus on reforming Godflesh was to ultimately make new music. We knew that we'd be going in and doing, so called, "reformation shows," which is all good because it would put enough money in our pockets to be able to invest back into a new record. I really felt, in my blood, that I needed to go back to this context of expression, which is very dear to me. I definitely missed it throughout Jesu's career. Ultimately, I initiated a couple of projects that were the catalyst for wishing to play as Godflesh again or wishing to write new material—the Greymachine record and the JK Flesh material. Both were just the path leading to me wishing to write again as Godflesh.

Pitchfork: After years of doing Jesu and all these other projects, how did it feel to go back to Godflesh, something you hadn’t done for 13 years?

JKB: I started Godflesh in my late teens and it led all the way up until I was 33 or something—really formative years. For all of us, this is a big chunk of our lives where we hopefully grow and evolve in some way. The transition from Godflesh to Jesu was really painful, not just because of the personal things I was experiencing. Jesu was a document for a lot of the pain that went on around that period of both a breakup I went through, the end of Godflesh was really sticky and messy, and just a lot of shit that'd come to a head at that time. I was using Jesu as an escape from that and a way to sort of document what I was going through, which was a good platform for the whole of Jesu's career, ultimately. It was hard, initially, to perform as Jesu, because I was used to a much more aggressive performance. Whereas Godflesh, I found to be a very unconscious performance. Halfway through Jesu's career—without Godflesh existing—it struck me that I was searching for [that] outlet again.

Pitchfork: Was it stressful to return to something after that many years? Certain records—Streetcleaner, Pure—are held up as iconic. Was there any stress in your mind, like “I'm gonna come back and screw up the legacy”?

JKB: Yeah. There was a lot of self-doubt before the first performance, and, unfortunately, the first performance went completely wrong via the usual technical demons that seem to have plagued most of our careers. I've always been doomed to technical fucking bullshit. It's quite bizarre. I almost invite it, I think. I do feel as if my own music as quite flawed, and it's that frailty or lack of technical proficiency that goes hand-in-hand with some sort of professionalism. I always felt that art should be somewhat flawed. That almost appears like it's an excuse for fucking up, but I like fuck-ups.

At first, it was so technically wrong that it was pathetic. We could've just turned around after that and said "fuck this." It's quite fortunate that the performance that followed that, the second reunion performance, was in our old hometown of Birmingham in the UK, the legendary Supersonic Festival. That was amazing! We just gave it our absolute all, which seemed to be enough, fortunately.

Ironically, we've quite literally played some of our best performances ever since we've reformed. A lot of people reform and all they talk about is nostalgically romanticizing the great old days, but a lot of the older days for us were appalling. We did some really horrible tours, loads of horrible shows, quite often imploded on stage, quite often technically things were wrong, a lot of PA's back in the day were appalling. We find now that soundsystems are really fantastic. Our last U.S. tour, we even curated the bill. Back in the day, you'd be with agents who would literally tell you to fuck off if you asked for another band.

I visualized where I'd wanted the band to go musically, but I didn't wanna commit anything for a good year-and-a-half. That just paved the way for the new material. And we just felt like, “Fuck expectation,” ultimately. There's always gonna be people saying they were so much better back in the day, but we feel utterly confident that this material is as good as any record we've made.

Pitchfork: How was it different recording Godflesh now? Technology is different 13 years later.

JKB: Ironically, Godflesh started off as this band embracing technology—essentially, we had a hip-hop drum machine. On paper, the whole thing with Godflesh was this marriage of down-tuned, highly textural, filthy guitar and bass with a drum machine which is derived and inspired by what's happening with old school hip-hop in the '80s. Even in the late '80s, before we got dumped in with the metal thing—which gave us a career, so I wouldn't even say that cynically—we were viewed as a byproduct of the American noise rock scene.

Clearly, we loved Big Black, but that wasn't one our sources of inspiration for using a drum machine. It was more Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, Beastie Boys, Run-D.M.C. Do you know what I mean? I'd always loved hip-hop. That was it. People would miss the point entirely because we were seen as some noise rock derivative and my former band before that, Head of David, comes straight out of the noise rock thing. It was very, very easy for people to say, yeah, they're just influenced by the American stuff like Swans, Big Black, Sonic Youth, and so we really felt they were missing the death metal influence, which was pretty clear to us, of primitive death metal, and everything else that come with it.

Eventually, by the time we signed to Earache and they presented us to a metal crowd it was then the metal people getting it, which was fantastic. It was initially really hard for us to digest the fact that metal audiences who had literally just come out of Skid Row, dudes with fucking big hair were getting into us. But it was an extreme metal explosion, an odd marriage of sound in a way.

We're still using our original drum machine, but it's literally welded to sample banks of some of my favorite producers of the 2000s, which was the Neptunes, Timbaland, and a lot of these sort of people. For me, these people were making great productions in the mid-to-late-2000s. I don't like what these people are doing now, but they were coming up with some absolutely heaving drum machine sounds, so I managed to acquire a lot of their sample banks, both legally and illegally, and have been sort of marrying those sounds to our old drum machine sounds, so it's got this old school hip-hop mixed with new school sounds.

Texturally, I think it still sounds quite similar, but it's quite clearly updated. I mean, what modern technology has done has afforded us the luxury of abbreviation and being concise with time, I think. Things that it would take you a week to do can now be done in a day, which is absolutely awesome because you can concentrate on the bigger picture. It's absolutely fantastic, but we still like limitations. Godflesh still likes parameters and to exist within a set of limitations because otherwise it's too open.

Pitchfork: Yeah, a good example of this is Chinese Democracy. Guns N' Roses' early material—Appetite for Destruction, in particular—was amazing. But there were financial and other limitations to that, and it gave them focus. Then, when you have 15 years of tinkering around in the studio and adding synthesized sitars, it just kind of floats into this amorphous wanking, and it loses impact.

JKB: They clearly had too much time on their hands. Endless fucking money—I think when you can be that supremely self-indulgent sometimes it's easy to get up one's own asshole. I need parameters. I need discipline.

Pitchfork: You used an eight-string guitar on the new album. How did that come about?

JKB: I was trying a seven-string initially because I was using a seven-string with Jesu the entire time but I found that I was still coming up with a lot of stuff that was too reminiscent of earlier Godflesh. We are honoring what we set out to do initially, but for me, we're not repeating it. We're continuing from where we left off. The eight-string was a great way to tune to a ridiculously lower level. I wanted to see how much lower we could go. Especially with something like Streetcleaner, we were tuning low and doing stuff that a lot of people at that point hadn't really done. People have done these things, but maybe not as defined or as abstract as a lot of the stuff that was on the periphery. I wanted to go further than that and eight-strings, also, could afford me a level of discordance that I couldn't reach previously. The eight-string is just a beast. It's a very, very beastly guitar. A huge heavy beast of a guitar, as well. It's nice. A six-string feels like a fucking ukulele now.

Pitchfork: It’s a good time for dark electronic music. If you listen to something like Kanye West's Yeezus, it's pretty noisy with loud drums, and he got Evian Christ to do production and Hudson Mohawke and Arca. It's an interesting time for Godflesh to return amid this whole musical landscape of people discovering darker music.

JKB: Absolutely, and living in averagely darker times than we have in a bit. That's a very interesting record you picked as an example of something that is, essentially, mainstream—Kanye West picked all these very cool underground producers to sit around in a room to make a beat. It's a really screwed up record, and I know a lot of mainstream hip-hop people, have been listening to things like Aphex Twin for years. When somebody first played me some of that album, I was just like, "Woah!" Some of it wasn't that far off from stuff I was doing with Techno Animal in, like, 2001, which at that time was met with utter derision and swept right under the carpet never to be heard of again.

Pitchfork: There just seems to be more of an overlap with heavy music and electronics right now. People, like Dominick Fernow, who were known for doing noise are making electronic music. Someone like Haxan Cloak's doing shows that are so heavy and bodily that people are kind of feeling like they're gonna vomit.

JKB: Electronic music, for me, has been the only real pioneering music that actually does push boundaries and is constantly futuristic. I don't listen to that much guitar music because I find it consistently regressive. It's, by and large, not the future. I'm always interested in very, very futuristic music and, like you said, with that happening, bridging the gap between the physicality of organic guitar music and trying to translate that into something electronic is really fascinating. Yeah, and I still feel Godflesh does bridge that gap. Obviously, with Godflesh we do treat our guitars almost as electronic instruments because, ultimately, there's no showiness to what we do.

I've never been a huge prog fan. My background is punk. My background is learning how to play a bar chord and listen to Discharge records when I was a kid. That was most important to me, at first. It's always been feel over technicality. That's what I like about electronic music is you don't really need to be that learned or educated in any particular context. You can just make sound, noise even, whatever it may be. This is a really important aspect of what Godflesh does. We don't do numerous takes even when we record. If we fuck up just a little, we always leave it in there.

Pitchfork: The new material is so stripped back, it's hard to place the year it was made. You wouldn't think it came out in 2014. Not that it feels like a throwback, but it's sort chiseled to a barebones space that feels somehow distant... There’s so much technology available, and this temptation of, “Hey, we can add this and do this and do that...” Humans and machines are so interconnected, there's so much possibility: People walking down the street checking phones while listening to headphones while reading a digital billboard… it's refreshing to have this sound “other” in some ways.

JKB: Yeah, that's it. We were quite aware of the fact, even after making the record, sitting down to listen to it, that it felt timeless in the context that you're referring to in that it's pretty much hard to place. If it sounded like that in five years from now, we would probably say the same thing, I think. Fuck knows where music will be in five years, but I still feel as if, yeah, we could've made this 10 years ago, we could make it in 10 years time.

Fortunately, I live in a fucking rural environment, so I don't see that many human beings, which is a pleasure. But when I do tour and we're doing shows and stuff and you're out in the city and the rest of it, it is a constant. People said, wow, this is futuristic music. This is still about that fusion of man and machine. I'm just like, it's been happening for years! It's right before you. You're connected to it right now. It's so ridiculous now. I'm sitting talking to you now. We don't even need a landline. It's amazing that I'm sitting here with two computers in front of me, a phone in front of me. It's overload.

Pitchfork: Like you're saying, you're turning 45 and I just turned 41, so we're both at this kind of age where we had a large part of our lives without internet or computers, but we're still young enough to know how to use the stuff, so we're in this weird position where we've had both things.

JKB: I feel somewhat privileged because I often feel very sorry for kids. I often feel very sorry for 20-year-olds and teens who, you know, who grew up with the internet and have grown up completely connected because, for me, people like you and I know what it was to struggle, but it wasn't a struggle. It was great! It was fantastic. The thrill of the hunt. You know, searching out music, art, whatever. The journey was often as good as the destination, you know. Now we've got the destination immediately. In fact, we have about 18 destinations all at our fingertips simultaneously, so much so that it's rendered quite meaningless. I feel privileged that I can appreciate it. I can truly, truly appreciate it because of my age. I've had the benefit of both worlds. I've had the benefit of swapping demo tapes with people across the other side of the world and waiting three weeks for it to arrive.

Pitchfork: The first song on the new album is called "New Dark Ages”. Is that an ironic title?

JKB: Yeah, it is quite ironic and it's loaded, like most Godflesh. It's ambiguous, but obviously, ambiguous within a whole realm and context of negativity. But yeah, it's ironic. A few people have said to me, "Oh yeah, the forthcoming dark ages," and I'm like, "No, we're already there, man." [laughs] Do you know what I mean? We've been there for fucking years.

Godflesh: "New Dark Ages" (via SoundCloud)

Pitchfork: Does that tie in with the album title, too? A World Lit Only by Fire feels like this very primitive idea.

JKB: Yeah, absolutely. That's it. For me, it's the resignation to the savage within. Cultures have gone down and rebuilt again and I'm sure we're all facing the same level of extinction. Bloodshed is what it's always been and it's still going on now. The savagery being committed in so-called fucking advanced, when you look and see a fucking children's hospital bombed in fucking Gaza you feel like fucking vomiting. These are advanced people. These are fucking, you're fucking savages, man. You're disgusting. You're as disgusting as people were that were doing this in World War II, World War I, in fucking Vietnam, Pol Pot, and all the way down the line. For me, they're still absolutely savages looking for any excuse for bloodshed. I catch myself with my own moments of bloodlust and anger and hatred. Yeah. It's succumbing to the atavistic being, that lineage all the way from the dirt and still just being a sword-wielding fucking caveman.

Pitchfork: I never really thought of Godflesh as a political band. People use the term "a lifer," someone who came from punk and doing death metal and grindcore and sort of sticking this out for the long haul, in a way that, in and of itself, is a political or punk act. Do you ever think of Godflesh in that sense or your musical projects in general that you've sort of stuck and stayed the course and committed to a certain way of life based around underground music?

JKB: To some extent, but I always fear dogma. I don't like anything that's dogmatic because it becomes purely religious again and I despise any form of organized religion. But I do still, relative to that, consider myself a very spiritual being. I fear being seen as political in any context because it's so limiting, but I do feel Godflesh is a protest music of sorts. That was the background that I came from, discovering Crass when I was such a young kid and being led to Throbbing Gristle and so on. But also the recognition of manners, of being a flawed creation. I always felt at odds, politically, with people, and with any group of people that congregate and declare themselves as some sort of movement. It's usually motivated by wishing to dominate other people.

Pitchfork: So with this whole overall worldview and aesthetic, is that why you decided to release it on your own label instead of shopping it around to other labels?

JKB: Absolutely. I mean, after so many years of varying interests and relationships with record labels...we started off with some very bad relationships, which pretty much dogged most of Godflesh's early career, if not the entirety of its early career. I think we've become so disenchanted with record labels...I had some lovely experiences as well, mostly in the last 10, 15 years, with many people who I trust and whose intentions have been entirely honorable.

But it seemed that having this career this long, and understanding how this industry works so well, it would be foolish for people like myself to give this to record labels. When really, in this day and age, when the industry's so diminished anyway, and there's nowhere near the amount of money in it as there was 15 years ago. We're about as DIY as it gets. Which is honoring what we come from, honoring what we intended to do, and honoring the punk background that I had. And why I thought records should be made, even as a kid. I had a cassette label in 1983, 1984, which released Power Electronics, my own stuff, the early material, totally inspired by the way Crass Records was, and Industrial Records by Throbbing Gristle, and inspired by bands like Whitehouse and their label, Ramleh and their label. These were DIY labels. I knew, then, as a 13, 14 year old, that these larger labels should be the enemy, ultimately.

They're run by fucking accountants and bank managers, and what do these fuckers have to do with music except reaping the dividends of it, you know what I mean? I was explaining this to someone the other day, and I was talking to someone quite conservative, a metal interview, but they were really shocked. The entire...They asked me on every level, and it was rhetorical questions, but it was like they almost couldn't believe it. They're like, "You engineer your own records?" "Yeah." "You produce your own records?" "Yeah. "In your own studio?" "Yeah." And then they were like, "But you design all your record sleeves?" "Yeah." "You make all the photos yourself?" "Yeah." They're like, "But it's on your own record label?" "Yeah!" [laughs.]

And it's like, there isn't anyone else in this equation, but it isn't necessary to have anyone else in this equation. It's got that far where I manage most of our own tours now. And that's just begun because you don't need someone else to translate for you.

It's as simple as that. I've got a young son who's three years old, and I'm trying to balance ten zillion projects at the same time. Often people say, "Oh man, employ someone else." And I'm like, no, because it won't get done right. And they're like, "No, it's just that in your opinion it won't get done right." And I'm like, that's enough though, isn't it, really?