Interview with Claude

The Title

Claude: What do you want someone to feel in the first thirty seconds of hearing this record?

Wil Arndt: "That's a sick bassline." I want people to feel it in their gut before the words hit the brain.

So who are the Dueling Suzis?

Wil: Two parts of the same person at war with each other. Feral incarnations of meaning beneath the veneer of polish and pop—the war within what was mainstream at the time, Britney Spears, Spice Girls. A search for the authentic beneath the carefully constructed caricature of pop that was designed to create cashflow. But it also sounds a bit flippant, which is intentional. Like "Who the hell cares if these Suzis are dueling? It's much ado about nothing." Maybe that tension is the point.

The Break

Claude: Colossal Spin had real momentum in Philadelphia—a band, a scene, a recording deal. Then you walked away from all of it and moved to Vancouver. What happened?

Wil: I'd dropped out of architecture school to pursue music. I gave myself about two years to gain real momentum, to at least secure a real record deal. Things were trending in the right direction—but I had to ask myself honestly: would my band and collaborators have followed me into the new directions I was hearing? I don't doubt it now. At the time it wasn't that easy. Sometimes the only way to move forward is to rearchitect yourself from the detritus of a past life. I gave myself a deadline. And when I hit it, I pulled the trigger.

What would have happened if you'd stayed?

Wil: In hindsight, knowing where the industry went, I think we would have been in a lot of pain as it shifted and changed around us. We could have pivoted, sure—but that's a decade time horizon to success. I probably made the right call. It still hurts a little, to know what I had.

Was it a clean break?

Wil: Vancouver was a shared dream—my wife's idea as much as mine, if not more. We both had a romance about it, but she'd wanted it first. We jumped together—less than a thousand dollars in our bank account, no job lined up, me on a student visa so I couldn't legally work. At the time it felt like faith—walking through the doors that open for you, when they open, and not overthinking it. In hindsight it was reckless. She worked so I could study. That's not a footnote. That's the foundation the record was built on.

What were you chasing? What did you hear that Philadelphia couldn't give you?

Wil: The best shows we ever played were in NYC—Colossal Spin as the industrial act on a bill with R&B, hip-hop, folk, country bands, all on the same stage on the same night. That was glorious and hard to come by in the Philly scene. I'd always loved sounds beyond rock and industrial—James Brown, Johnny Cash, Black Sheep, Meat Beat Manifesto. Funk and rhythm. I wanted a posture toward music that embraced all of it without apology. That wasn't really about Vancouver specifically. It was about an attitude—a globalism absent from the inward, US-centric view I'd grown up in. Vancouver was the door that opened.

And the music itself—how did you actually make it under those conditions?

Wil: Not long before, I'd had access to a multi-million dollar studio—multiple recording spaces, the best gear, giant mixing desks, professional engineers. Now I had a crappy PC, a thirty-dollar soundcard, pirated software. Cheap amps, cheap mics, a tiny apartment where neighbours would bang on the ceiling and floor to tell me to shut up. I remember thinking at the time—fuck them all, I'm making this record. And I did.

The Platform That Disappeared

Claude: Something_DB hit number one in industrial rock on MP3.com. Reptile charted. And then it all stopped. What happened?

Wil: MP3.com faded out after massive copyright lawsuits from the record labels in 2001. In the absence of real alternatives for indies distributing and monetizing their work online, and with my design practice taking off and more proximate, selfless concerns taking over—family, a new life—everything conspired to halt the Colossal Spin project. It wasn't one decision. It was a confluence.

Was Colossal Spin gaining any other kind of traction in that period?

Wil: There was real momentum building. Music was getting placed on MTV, in literary arts publications online, across a string of indie compilations on labels like Blacklight and Flaming Fish. The design world and the music world were starting to cross-connect through my company Mod7. It felt like things were converging—and then the platform collapsed and took most of it with it.

And now you're back on Spotify—another platform, another set of terms you didn't write. Does that feel like déjà vu?

Wil: Early adopters of platform concepts don't always tend to win. MP3.com, Friendster—the new thing is usually monetized and colonized by big business and then ruined for the indie. The music that outlasts the platform is the music that makes a strong connection with an audience, that people love, that requires it to constantly make the leap from platform to platform. That is the legacy. That is longevity.

You're releasing a 26-year-old record into an infinite stream of content. Why bother?

Wil: Because the music deserves to exist in the world rather than on a hard drive. There's still an audience—indie labels and magazines in the darkwave and industrial world that never stopped caring about this kind of music. But honestly it's less about the audience and more about finishing what I started. Not me. The music. Once it's out there, I'm free to work on the next thing.

The Songs

Claude: Something_DB opens the record with a hard bassline and the question "Oh, what do you believe?" Tell me about writing it.

Wil: I had a vision of a melding of genres—drum and bass, industrial, noise—creating the music for the new century. But something was missing. A kind of otherworldliness. A hint of the beyond, of something bigger, a world felt from beyond the veil of what we see. Then I'd accidentally piled a couple of reverbs and delays out of order and pushed the vocals through that chain. And suddenly it was there—this ghostly chorus from somewhere else, a rich bed of space that existed behind and beyond the song. "I feel it breaking through" was a line that found new meaning in that sound. It was the moment the song became what it needed to be.

Crash is the most stripped-back, intimate thing here—slow, jazzy, almost whispered baritone. And your wife sings on it. How did that come about?

Wil: The song has a lounge feel, and me singing over my own voice would break that illusion. We needed another voice in the room. My wife has a quality that's hard to describe—lighter, more open than mine, it carries without pushing. She's singing the same refrain I am—"it's crashing down on me"—but it sounds completely different coming from her. That contrast is the whole point.

Everything (My God Mix) ends with "Jesus is my God / Jesus is my everything." That's not what anyone expects on a Colossal Spin record. What's going on there?

Wil: At the time, the declaration was genuine—with the understanding that some people might take it ironically. I think it works read both ways. Art isn't meant to be prescriptive. It's meant to be provocative, open to interpretation. I was inside the faith and still working through what that meant, still confronting its contradictions. I'm still doing that. The song holds that tension without resolving it—which is maybe the most honest thing about it.

GB_Vegas is built around a tape recording you made of a casino floor. That's not an obvious source of inspiration.

Wil: My wife and I made a pilgrimage to Vegas and the Grand Canyon in 1998. Part of it was immersing myself in the tensions and disparities—the astounding achievement of human-created media immersion in Vegas, the spectacle of it, set against desert nature, contrasted with the natural formations and awe of the Canyon itself. I'd been long influenced by Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour's Learning From Las Vegas—the idea that the communicative meaning of symbols matters as much as, and almost more than, purity of material or high art. That symbolism and popular taste, as expressed through design and music, can be more meaningful art than pure form. The layered meanings in everyday, ordinary life.

So I brought a cheap tape recorder to capture ideas, and one evening I walked through the casino floor—the guards had stopped me from recording before, so I had the recorder in my pocket—to capture the ambience. That drone and chime made it onto the album.

What is the song actually about?

Wil: There's a kind of guilt that comes with experiencing something and not immediately accounting for it. Not reading it, not filing it away as meaning. Not photographing it to post later. This song is about dropping that—the moment you stop being a witness to your own experience and just become part of it. "Am I responsible for you?" is the last gasp of that analytical mode. And then it goes. What replaces it is texture—air, light, movement, the specific weight of a night that's going somewhere or nowhere. Revelling in something you've stopped trying to explain is actually harder than it sounds. The song is trying to do that. To make the experience itself the material, not the thing the experience points to.

Wide Open wasn't on the original 2000 release. You've brought it in for the remaster. Why now?

Wil: It was the opening track on a release I'd put together in 1998 called Information Age that never fully came out. Some of those songs ended up on Dueling Suzis, but this one didn't. Partly because I never felt it was finished—it's missing something I still can't fully name, maybe a key change, a stronger chorus. But I've come to realize that so much of my work hasn't been released because I never felt it was done. There are songs we played live, made up in the moment, that crowds really responded to—but I never pushed them out because they weren't perfect. Perfect is the enemy of moving on. Good enough and out there is more valuable than perfect and unheard.

Reptile wasn't on the original 2000 release—you included a remix instead. This remaster is the first time the Sonic Studios recording has had a proper home. That's a session with Michael Richelle engineering, Jim Wallace on guitars, Brian Reed on drums, radio play on WDRE. Why did it take 26 years?

Wil: It was quite polished, somewhat poppy sounding—not quite the true alternative sound of the moment. The original remix I put on the 2000 release was too abrasive going the other way. The Sonic Studios recording deserves its proper place in the catalogue. That deal was a real opportunity, and it was great to have members of the live band—Jim and Brian—actually play on the songs. That version of the recording captures something the solo studio work doesn't.

The Weight of It

Claude: The project halts, life takes over. You come back to this record 26 years later. What does it feel like to open it back up?

Wil: There was a little death when the music stopped. Then life happened—my daughter was born, my design firm flourished, and music was slowly crowded out until I no longer missed it. The original fire just wasn't there anymore. But something shifted in the last few years. I'm 52. I can still sing, still drum, still pick up a guitar. These are gifts—maybe that's too presumptuous a word, but whatever they are, I don't want to squander them. My body is moving toward a place where performing like I used to will get harder. I've moved through a season of life where the spotlight was somewhere quieter, where I embraced different roles. Now it's moving back. Back to energy, back to a new kind of noise—or an old kind, depending on how you look at it. Coming back to Dueling Suzis is part of that. I hear that stupid kid with big aspirations in it—someone who will not be stopped by the walls in front of him. I need a little of him now.

The Last Word

Claude: What's the one thing you want someone who's never heard Colossal Spin to take away from Dueling Suzis?

Wil: Broke, on a student visa, thirty dollars worth of gear, irate neighbours. Someone made this anyway. Whether anyone was listening at the time doesn't change that.