Severed Heads are pre-techno. They are, to me, one of the few acts that have consistently made electronic sounds approachable and warm, but not necessarily accessible. Rather than cloaking the sounds in infinite veils of electronic effects, the sounds are allowed to speak for themselves. Rather than collapse inward towards the techno-trance-gabber-breakbeat-industrial conveyor belt, Severed Heads have maintained an approach that is, on the surface, naive, complete with lyrics. On the verge of releasing their latest project, the Gigapus album and the accompanying (buyers can choose) Metapus CD-ROM, and long format video, Vidipus, I spoke to Tom Ellard in the comfort of his technology-lined abode.

"You get the album for the usual price and then the CD-ROM or the hour long video for an extra ten bucks. The CD-ROM has a fifteen year band history with most of the tracks on their nine albums, unreleased tracks, and, most impressively, 40 minutes of their video work . . . Even though we said in 1988 that we'd be doing interactive media, its taken us until now to get it all together . . . We've spent over two years trying to get this album out mainly because Nettwerk (their old label) has gone soft . . . America is declining but Europe is expanding rapidly, I think its because the Americans still like pounding drums, guitars . . . its a fast and violent place and hence they have no time for waft . . . having done our early albums with house bricks being dropped on goats heads I don't have much time for it really . . . The album has been recorded in its entirety twice and has been revised seven times. We've been quiet for a while but now there's going to be an explosion - the album, the tours, the CD-ROM". Tom Ellard is also developing a means of working with video so that live performances can be even more remarkable. "The problem with video is that everything is sequentially recorded and played back [you cannot play the first two minutes of a film immediately after the middle ten minutes, for instance - there is a start and end point]. I am trying to record our video work onto a hard disk so that live we can access any frame or sequence in micro-seconds and 'play' the images". The problems he faces lie in the technology, and in its specialised complexity.

Technology has advanced so quickly over the last decade that now the average home, according to American GenX writer, Douglas Rushkoff, has the ability for more information throughput than a seventies NASA laboratory. As technology frees up our access as citizens to information and old barriers of gender, class, race and age, begin to break down, the social control of technology tightens. Such control no longer takes the form, so much, of laws and regulations but more of planned disinformation. How many of those people who have personal computers at home know of the freedom a modem [a device that transmits information from words, to pictures to sound across normal telephone lines] provides? Further, of those who own modems, how many actually know how to successfully navigate the supposed 'information superhighway' and the fabled Internet? Knowledge is now the key, and monopolies of knowledge are building up along the old divisions of gender, class, race and age, in a much more disempowering manner than in the past. What is worse, lack of equipment, or lack of knowledge of how to use the equipment that you have been told you need?

In music, technology, too, is rapidly expanding, breaking down in its path notions of the author and of ownership. To keep this, rather radical behaviour, in check, the music industry and the music consumers have placed little fences around styles. "As the technological possibilities expand the social possibilities seem to be collapsing inwards. Words are a prison . . . 'Oh so you do techno? Is it industrial techno, or trance techno, or country and western techno, etc etc'". Whilst on the otherhand; "a decent sampler is going to cost a kid $4000. A PC and a soundcard is going to cost them about $2000. Its a lot more democratic". But Tom Ellard sees the Australian scene in a very positive light and is constantly amazed by the sheer volume of music emanating from such a small place. "I'm really impressed with the amount of music coming out of Australia especially in relation to the size of our population and I just hope that we don't have to always be under the thumb of the Northern Hemisphere . . . its really bad that it is still the case that you have to get a German DJ in before anyone will come [to a rave], but its always been like that, I mean Severed Heads had to go to England to make it . . . in the performing arts, film, everywhere, its the same, my brother-in-law had to go to England to study oncology just to get the recognition he deserved".

Inevitably, discussion leads to the most visible form of techno culture, but not necessarily the largest, the rave. "I go along to raves and feel sort of dislocated but I understand the ideas of trance states and the whole rhythm thing but so much of the other bullshit irritates the hell out of me - the Mandlebrot sets and all the hippie crap - do we really want to be like the cast of Hair all over again?". Try telling that to the Vibe Tribe. But Tom has hit again on the whole "shrinking social possibilities" of technology issue. Rather than embrace the future in its entirety, the "Mandlebrot sets and all the hippie crap" represent yet another self-pigeonholing of identity. Perhaps a more progressive mentality, and indeed a more subversive one, is to be tribal without being obviously so. "I think that people can be tribal in nature and their ways of working without having to be tribal in appearance. Its too New Romantic for me - cross-dressing and wearing pantaloons".

In reality, though, it seems that Severed Heads do not really belong in the same world as that of raves and Mandlebrot sets. Being around for such a long time, fifteen years, has meant that they still appeal to the pre-techno crowd, and unlike even older acts such as Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic TV, Ozric Tentacles (now Eat Static), and others, Severed Heads have remained relatively true to their sound and style. "Its interesting that in the early days we sold records because we didn't sound like any other band and now we are always having remixes done for us so we do sound like other bands. Remixing seems to be, according to the record companies, the only way of staying afloat . . . the remixes have been done predominantly by Volition acts because the record company holds the money . . . David Thrussell [of Snog] was interested in remixing a track and the Grid have done a remix of Greater Reward but now its done what are we going to do with it? I don't want to push it out just for the sake of it or for the money but in England its being ripped off left right and centre . . . Volition is telling me that Dead Eyes is on the A-list at Triple J and is getting heaps of requests all the time but its eleven years old . . . they'll get a shock when they realise that we are the Grateful Dead of Australia . . . I just wasn't prepared to chase the dance scene and we still get requests to re-issue the first album, all that [puts on a goth accent] 'industrial' stuff"

Perhaps with a new audience being reared on rave-style techno, Severed Heads are in danger of becoming "retro" and appearing as headline acts alongside the "best of the Eighties", alternatively, a new following may emerge buoyed by such Triple J (re-)exposure. More likely Severed Heads will continue to refuse to follow trends in search of a quick buck and find new waters. The CD-ROM project and their video work, especially, take them far ahead of their counterparts into a completely different arena. "I'd really like to do an album on CD-ROM that would sound different everytime you played it . . . like a very complex windchime that would respond to audio input. On a video front the ideal thing would be to 'play the videos' like a musical instrument and sequence them live . . . there's so much to do and its important to ensure that the music doesn't turn into pus in the meantime". Surely not.

Yellow Peril (1994)

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