Foetus Maximus
Jim Thirlwell, a demon for all seasons
By Skylaire Alfvegren
LA Weekly: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 - 12:00 am
Sure, Foetus is a big bludgeoning rock machine, but listen closely: To short-change Foetus by calling it “industrial music” is like saying Frank Lloyd Wright built stuff. Every epic crescendo, every blaring horn, every whip of the synth is transcendent, operating on a level deeper and more visceral than most Western music is capable of. It’s as if the demon in The Exorcist had been cast into the body of Brian Setzer instead of Linda Blair. Jim Thirlwell, your toxic troubadour, understands music’s true purpose: to stir the soul.
The mind-numbing textural depth Thirlwell has become known for is plastered all over the recent Flow, which he produced, arranged, composed, recorded and performed, with the exception of a nibble of guitar and violin. Invoking car chases, curdled love affairs and a “particular Hollywood-jazz-crime-scene,” Flow is the most fully realized Foetus disc to date, and, like Chinese finger torture, it becomes more complex with each listen. For this project, Thirlwell went “back to the old school,” constructing the music at his own Self Immolation Studios in New York (where he’s lived since the early ’80s).
But Foetus, he says, is “only one part of the franchise.” Thirlwell’s ripples in popular music have resulted in hurricanes. He’s largely worked alone, but there have been collaborations: Wiseblood, a whiskey-soaked, blood-on-the-ivories tent revival with Swans’ Roli Mosimann; percussive poetry with Lydia Lunch as Stinkfist; and Steroid Maximus, something altogether indescribable. In the studio, he’s been the wizard behind the curtain for such acts as Coil, Nine Inch Nails, Prong, Voivod, Marilyn Manson and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
This year, in between the release of three entirely separate but equally ambitious albums — Flow, Blow (the Flow remix album) and Volvox Turbo, with new side project Manorexia — Thirlwell has just completed a U.S. tour and will be leaving for Europe next month (where he hopes to lug his laptop studio along on the road, “to keep the perpetual motion machine going”). He still manages to slot in the random remix, and is working on a new Steroid Maximus album, due sometime in 2002.
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