There are few musicians that I've had the pleasure of talking to that can hold a conversation as well as one Drew Daniel. One half of IDM twiddlers Matmos and the sole evil genius behind the Soft Pink Truth, Daniel talked about hardcore punk rock and yummy noises with me like we were just two dudes at the local gay bar. Despite the alluring prospect of simply shooting the shit with a genuinely nice guy, I stuck to my guns and fired out some interview questions about the Soft Pink Truth's new record Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth? and the upbringing that inspired it.

Interviewed December 17th, 2004

[Originally for Junkmedia.org.]

Codebreaker: How's your holiday season going?
Drew Daniel: Well, it's been crammed with stuff. I'm giving at Stanford tomorrow on the Merchant of Venice, so there's been a lot of preparation for that on the academic front. Musically, there's a blizzard of possible shows for Matmos and Soft Pink Truth and it's kind of about find a way to make it graceful and make us not lose our day jobs. There's some cool stuff coming; I'm gonna play the Terms Media Festival in Berlin and at Mutech at Montreal and Sonar at Barcelona with the Soft Pink Truth. Matmos is doing quite a lot too. We're going to play that ATP fest, the one that Slint is curating and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, yadda yadda. So there's a lot going on.

CB: So you're going to be rather jetset for a while.
DD: Yeah, it's weird; we kind of thought now that Martin was going back to work at the Art Institute and I was just trying to write the dissertation, we weren't going to get caught up in the Bjork tour monster. Everything would get, well, frankly dull. [laughs] But it doesn't seem to have worked out that way.

CB: What are fans of the Soft Pink Truth like, especially with the new record coming out?
DD: The one's that I met tend to be sort of fashiony, gay boys with asymmetrical haircuts that are very, very thin; or, kind of cool, shouty girls. I just had a bra thrown at me the lost Soft Pink Truth show, which I thought was awesome. I think the risk with something so faggy is that it becomes... like a gay male thing, which I certainly didn't want. I like it better when clubs and parties are mixed up gender-wise. It seems like the ladies like the Soft Pink Truth too -- the feeling is mutual. I don't know; I think it's divided between people that maybe are the sort of IDM, nerd, Matmos contingent that have distain for dance music but dabble because of the Matmos connection, I think that's one set of people. The other set are people that have no interest in Matmos but just want to get down. I'm glad that the Soft Pink Truth can work for two pretty different and maybe mutually not-comprehending sets of people.

Continue reading the interview with Drew Daniel by clicking here.