How I Became the Bomb

Volume II: Foremost Sentinel

As Kubrick-ian or Asimov-ian as it sounds, this maxim applies to the Surveillance and Response Group of the RAAF. Quartered into Wings, this division of the Australian Defence Force serves as the early warning and response capability for the formerly punitive province. This relatively small force element group is responsible for not only maritime warfare, but also surveillance, aerospace, and battle space management. Purely by chance, the motto also serves as the title of How I Became the Bomb's second digital release.

The Foremost Sentinel is the enormity of life, an organized chaos.

Q: Where did you guys come up with the idea for this method of releasing your music? What made you guys decide to forgo the standard LP?

A: I think our collective musical dissociative disorder prohibits us from making the album that people who buy albums want. The cohesive twelve song LP doesn't interest us. We're singles guys, song guys, mixtape guys. So why not release our stuff in smaller intervals and in smaller quantities? This allows us to work more efficiently and keep our music coming regularly to fans' hands and ears. I don't know if the advent of the digital age has killed the album, but it certainly has made it easier for us to work around it. In the best-case scenario, we've installed a new format for release that people enjoy and others may follow. In the worst case scenario, those clamoring for an album can just wait for the end of the year, when we'll release what we're calling an "Annual," which will collect the year's work, along with whatever videos we've produced. By titling each release as a "Volume," and each compendium as an "Annual," we're hoping to achieve the feeling we used to get when a new comic book arrived. We hope it sort of serializes our work and makes it more fun for our fans.

You did it at Lake Fever, correct? Who did you work with as far as production goes?

This was our second time around at Lake Fever. On Let's Go! we worked with Jason Bullock, who did a phenomenal job capturing our live sound. For this record, we wanted to see if we could get the sounds in our head on record. Enter John Baldwin, who mastered the mini-album and basically shares a brain with me. A year and a half later and we have nearly twenty songs ready for permeation and, somehow, I'm now best man in his wedding. Oh, the tangled web we weave.

What are the first 3 songs? Tell me a little bit about each one...

“Salvage Mission” - Metaphors akimbo on this little ditty about a fellow searching for his sweetheart on the outer edges of space.

“A Formal Occasion” - A dance-y little number, with plenty of low end and terrifically absurd lyrics.

“Tomorrow's Date” - In a roundabout way, I think we're doing our best Queen impression on this one.

“Salvage Mission” will be the first of many videos. What's the concept?

Taking inspiration from all of our favorite outer space epics, we've put together a little cockpit drama, in which all of the events play out on the faceplate of our space voyager. Viewers will look into the eyes of our wayward wanderer as he searches for his ol' lady in the outer reaches of space.

I understand Robert Paynter is the director. He's fairly accomplished, correct? He's worked with Nike and such. How did you guys come to work with him?

Rob Paynter is creating the images and he, along with Jonny Kingsbury, also set up and shot the video. You may have seen his work with various big name athletic apparel groups and the like. He does great work and even has found his work up on the digital billboards on Times Square.

What was the experience like?

Allow me to explain the perils of donning a cosmonaut helmet for nearly six hours:

A. The damned thing was actually sealed, meaning I had to breath through a small tube. Also, I couldn't drink anything. Furthermore, by my reckoning, I probably inhaled close to a billion dead cosmonaut skin cells. Needless to say, I became fairly ill shortly after shooting.

B. Unfortunately for us, we didn't happen to have a Geiger counter handy, so we never had the chance to check the helmet for radiation. This thing did leave this atmosphere on Christmas Day, 1987, after all. Who knows what cancerous gamma rays I ingested during the shoot.

You're also going to release a 2nd video this month for “A Formal Occasion.” What can we expect from that? Who's directing?

Johnny Kingsbury, a prominent photographer around town, is directing. Our bassist and resident horror expert, Ricky Bizness, is the idea man behind this one, so expect bloodshed.

Back to the music, what did you want to capture both sonically and thematically with the new work? What were your influences and inspirations, both musically and lyrically?

We've always admired artists who were able to sustain the life of their music by making it so dense and intricate that it would hold up after hundreds of listens. Hopefully, we've achieved some semblance of what Spector, ELO, ABBA, and others did so frequently with their music. Lyrically, we probably owe more to Zelazny, Asimov, and Wilde than any lyricist I can think of off the top of my head. We certainly put far more into the notes than the words. The lyrics, for us, are just to put the finishing touches on the little story we're telling.

Give us a teaser as to what we can expect from all of this. What exiting things do you have on the horizon as far as pairing songs with videos, specific concepts or directors?

To paraphrase Jules Verne: "Anything one can imagine, one can make real." We aim to keep trying to get bigger and better. Fans can expect at least three songs and a video every three to four months.

Volume I: Who Dares Wins

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Although it is employed by elite special forces units from nations as disparate as Rhodesia, Cyprus, Israel, and Belgium, this military motto is best associated with the British Special Air Service. Usually spoken of in hushed tones, the SAS has long stood as the summit to which other special units aspire; a cold and harsh serac, stabbing skyward above all other military mobs. Oddly enough, the motto also serves as the title of How I Became the Bomb's first digital release.