❝  [Brian and I] had al­ready started a whole set of im­prov­i­sa­tions in the studio around March, 1994. Out of that came dia­logue and land­scape that was tied together, not even ten­u­ously. All the elements were fairly dis­parate. This is a once-in-a-life­time chance, by a narra­tive device, to chron­i­cle the final five years of the mi­llen­nium. The over-ambi­tious inten­tion is to carry this through to the year 2000.

❝ What Brian and I are try­ing to do is devel­op a series of albums. [Out­side] is the first in this cycle of albums. [The diary is] only the sub­ject mat­ter, it’s not the con­tent of the album. The con­tent is very much the atmo­sphere and tex­ture of the music, that strange place that music in­deed puts you which can­not be artic­u­lated. The story itself is semi-linear, so if you want to, follow it in a linear fashion, but it’s not abso­lute­ly nec­es­sary. The pieces them­selves can be auton­o­mous, they are pieces of music on their own.

❝ Well, Brian, very clev­er­ly, be­cause of being what he is, which is basic­al­ly a con­cep­tual­ist, turned every­thing into a series of games once we got into the studio: To al­low the musi­cians to not be who they are for short periods of time.

❝ As for musicians, it was impor­tant to choose those who were not weighed down with musical cliché, who had ter­rif­ic con­trol over their abil­ities. Yet were a bit loony.

❝  A piece that shows the ex­treme it could get to is “A Small Plot of Land”. That piece in par­tic­u­lar was a first class indi­ca­tion of what hap­pens when you put peo­ple in a strange place like that.

❝ Eno would create little flash cards for them in the mor­nings. He would cre­ate situ­a­tions they would have to put them­selves in men­tal­ly, intel­lec­tual­ly, and then start play­ing from that point of view. On each one, a charac­ter was writ­ten, like (You are the dis­grunt­led mem­ber of a South Afri­can rock band. Play the notes that were sup­pressed). ... Be­cause that set the tone for the day, the music would take on all those ob­scure areas. And it would very rarely lapse into the cliché. So we changed the status of the begin­ning of these pieces and they came in­to them like aliens from an­oth­er place. It opened up a whole area of im­prov­i­sa­tion. ... It’s very hard to ex­plain [laughs], you should have been there.

❝ The lyric writing itself was fairly hazar­dous. What I did, I took a lot of areas of sub­ject mat­ter I’m inter­ested in and wrote short para­graphs or pieces of poetry around those sub­jects and fed them in­to this Mac­in­tosh compu­ter I have. I have a ran­dom key on it and it will ran­dom­ize what I have writ­ten. So it was basic­al­ly the Mac­in­tosh’s choice that it was New Jer­sey. But it was also a bit of Eng­land, too, with New Ox­ford Town. [Then de­cide] wheth­er I was go­ing to sing, do a dia­logue, or be­come a charac­ter. I would im­pro­vise with the band, real­ly fast on my feet, get­ting from one line to an­oth­er and see­ing what worked.

❝ There’s no in­tent in it, there’s no mean­ing. I’m not a mean­er. I don’t have this great thing that I have to say. It’s a collec­tion of frag­ments of infor­ma­tion, of ideas, that are assem­bled and pro­duce a cer­tain atmo­sphere.

❝ Next year, we’ll devel­op a whole new slew of other charac­ters or may­be re-intro­duce some of these or even negate some of them. May­be we’ll never find Baby Grace. May­be [Detec­tive Nathan] Adler will become the next victim. I don’t know. And that’s what’s kind of inter­es­ting. May­be we’ll just get bored with murder as art and move in­to an­oth­er area of our society. It’s all up for grabs. So I‘m quite inter­ested in the future of this thing.

❝ I think [the album is] a con­flu­ence of events. First, we def­i­nite­ly per­ceive mur­der now as enter­tain­ment. It’s used to a mas­sive ex­tent in cinema. And pret­ty much it’s a space fill­er in TV. There’s the whole gladia­torial arena spec­tacle of some­how appeas­ing gods or look­ing at the fears and anxie­ties of the public.

❝ [Brian and I] were both inter­ested in nib­bling at the periph­ery of the main­stream rather than jump­ing in. We sent each other long mani­fes­toes about what was miss­ing in music and what we should be do­ing. We de­ci­ded to real­ly experi­ment and go in­to the studio with not even a gnat of an idea.

❝ The momentum gathers as we ap­proach the end of this cycle of 100 years, a huge anguish that every­thing will change. I wanted to make a rec­ord that reflec­ted those anxie­ties, a state of moral, spiri­tual and emo­tional panic. With peo­ple break­ing off into small groups to feel some sense of com­munity.

❝ Plus this growing momen­tum in body art, which has been pre­cip­i­tated over the last 15 years or so with peo­ple like Kiki Smith and Damian Hirst and Ron Athey and Chris Bur­den. The idea of us­ing the body as yet anoth­er medium, like wood or metal or glass or stone – al­most the polit­i­ciz­ing of the body itself. Almost ex­trap­o­la­ting on that in an alle­go­ri­cal fash­ion to have this rather dark, satir­ical idea of where art could go.

❝ Dalí ... knew exactly what he was do­ing. He knew what all the objects meant ... The at­ti­tude that says the artist should paint on­ly things the pro­le­ta­rian can under­stand, I think, is the most de­struc­tive thing pos­sible.

❝ About 20 per­cent of what I put in [the al­bum] are fic­tion­al and the rest are real, but it’s very hard to tell the dif­fer­ence. But the most sur­pris­ing one, like the Korean cut­ting off pieces of him­self in the late ’70s in New York, was not apocry­phal. I checked back with Art Forum.

❝ I’m sure you know a writ­er, Thom­as de Quin­cy. For those of us who grew up in the ’60s, his Con­fes­sions of an Opium Eater was a kind of bible. At that time, in 1820, he wrote a small piece for Black­woods, a Lon­don maga­zine, called Mur­der Con­sid­ered as a Fine Art which laid down exact­ly that theory.

❝  Sort of that clas­sic idea of tak­ing a life as some­thing sort of ritual­ized. Lots of things came in­to it. It wasn’t a sim­ple, direct jour­ney. Even the sur­real­ists, like André Breton, who said in the ’20s, prob­a­bly one of the great­est acts of art would be to go out into a crowd and shoot a revol­ver into it.

❝ ... the other things that went into [Outside], Brian and I are both fans of a form of art known as Out­sider Art. I, for the last 15 years, have lived next to the holy shrine of out­sider art, an art museum in Swit­zer­land called Le Brut, set up by Dubuffet. He set it up be­cause he felt he was ter­ribly in­flu­enced by the kinds of art that were made by peo­ple who lived an un­struc­tured life – in insti­tu­tions, or her­mits, or were os­tra­cized by society for one rea­son or another. He col­lec­ted the art that they made and to­ward the late years of his life opened this museum and put their work in it. That actual­ly was a source of inspi­ration when we went in for our last three albums in the late 70s. ... The les­son to learn from out­sider art was that the artist should be primal. Tech­nique or virtu­osity didn’t matter; that which was un­formed and scream­ing inside of you, wait­ing to be released, was the real essence of the crea­tiv­ity. ... The idea of work­ing with­out knowl­edge or judge­ment, either self-judge­ment or of how the out­side world per­ceives what you’re doing.

❝ I’ll tell you some­thing which hap­pened sub­se­quent­ly to record­ing the album which was dis­tur­bing in it­self. There’s a Dutch artist, Rob Scholte, who’s pret­ty well-known in Europe. One day, in Decem­ber 1994, he came down from his apart­ment and got in his car w/ his wife and he heard a tick­ing sound. Need­less to say, his car seat blew up and he was left with­out legs. With­in a week fol­low­ing that, one of his con­tem­po­ra­ries had been down to the attemp­ted as­sas­si­na­tion spot and filmed the wreck­age, the crash area, and was using it as a per­for­mance piece in a gallery in Am­ster­dam. That’s not a hair’s breadth away from what was satir­ical. And of course now Rob Scholte is doing per­for­mance shows where he makes great play over the fact that he no long­er has a pair of legs. They still haven’t found out who blew him up, but there are all kind of theories rang­ing from a drug con­nec­tion to a jealous artist.

❝ The morality of any society is quite strange. In the final­i­ty, it’s deci­ded by law what hap­pens. Peo­ple change their net­work of com­fort by chang­ing laws to make things accept­able or un­accept­able.

❝ I think that our religious philos­o­phies trail so far be­hind the way that we actual­ly live today that we find our­selves in a spiritual void, and I think it affects the young very much indeed. ... We con­tin­ual­ly try and find ritual, but we have no religious order to con­nect that ritual to. ... So we have to re­invent God, I think, in our own new way of life to give our­selves anoth­er form of spir­itual sus­tenance.

❝ Oh, I’ve got the fond­est hopes for the fin de siècle. I see it as a sym­bolic sacri­ficial rite. I see it as a deviance, a pagan wish to appease gods, so we can move on. There’s a real spiritual starva­tion out there being filled by these muta­tions of what are barely remem­bered rites and rituals. To take the place of the void left by a non-author­i­ta­tive church. We have this panic button tell­ing us it’s gon­na be a colossal mad­ness at the end of this century.

❝ I think the idea of becom­ing com­for­table with the idea of chaos is how we are pro­gress­ing – that life and the uni­verse are ex­treme­ly untidy. Any­thing that pulls back the veil on that chaos is a step near­er a more realis­tic under­stand­ing of what our state is – so I em­brace chaos. I’m a child of the ’70s, re­mem­ber. I’m plural­istic by nature. I always had the un­for­tu­nate facility of being able to see both sides of every pic­ture. It wasn’t a ques­tion of not being able to deter­mine which side I was on, but see­ing that things didn’t have sides. It wasn’t as sim­ple as that. ❞