Tuxedomoon

Steven: I live in Oaxaca. I moved to Mexico several years ago.

Blaine: It is released with a re-edition of Half-Muted. Give Me New Noise are cover versions of the album done by other artists.

Blaine: It is a project from a friend of us in Paris, Philippe Perreaudin. He is a member of the band Palo Alto. He produced and curated this record on his own. So he spoke to our record label and we thought it could be a really nice idea to release the two records together.

Steven: Well, when moved to San Francisco and started out, in 1978-1979, we wanted to experiment. We were young and free. We had a record contract that let us do what we wanted to do. We used what we had: a saxophone, a violin, a guitar, a borrowed synthesizer, a piano and a studio. The last record Tuxedo recorded was in 2012, which was the soundtrack for the film Pink Narcissus (1971) – we reworked the score for the film’s 40th anniversary.
I have changed in the sense that I moved to Mexico and started to study music in Oaxaca at Centro De Música Contemporánea. I’ve been learning a lot about composition, using different tools, and composing for string quartets, brass, whatever. So this has been a major change for me. As a matter of fact, I created a personal project called Assemble Kafka, where I employ many things learned in this period. Tuxedomoon is all lyric, and nowadays I work differently.

Steven: I got there in 1975, and there was still the magic from the sixties. This hangover made of San Francisco a magical place. Communists, homosexuals, bisexuals, vegetarians… we got money from the state because we were crazy – “I can’t work, I am crazy:” so the government gave us money. I was part of this collective, The Angels of Life, and we’d put money in a pot, 15 people living together putting $350 every month. That money would produce shows, all of which had to be free. Later on I meet Blaine and we started Tuxedo, and I had to leave the Angels, as Tuxedo started playing in clubs where they charged money at the door and that was taboo.

Steven: We met in San Francisco City College. We went both to same class of electronic music. We had access to take the course and use their equipment and synthesizers.

Blaine: It was a great situation. I, for instance, was pretty poor and on top of that my violin got stolen. So I had really nothing, and the school provided instruments. I was also in the orchestra and they provided me a violin, which was great until I got my own again. The recording studio was a great situation.
Steven: Yes. In fact, the very first song of Tuxedomoon was made there. We recorded sequences and then on stage used them live. Today they use laptops, but back then it was all tape-recorder.

Blaine: It is not important, really. It was a found object.

Blaine: Yes, and also Filmmaking. I made some small films. The were two computers and I learnt to program in basic. Actually, in the show we did at the end of the year I used the computer, I wrote in a very simple program. That was fun. I also had access to the library school, you know, in 1977 I could go there and watch different videos. A multimedia experience.

Blaine: I sort of came with this idea on my own, I wasn’t aware that you could actually study this interdisciplinary art in universities in California. It just seemed to me to be the right thing to do. I’ve been always interested in all these media. I’m from Colorado and found these things quite late in the seventies. Back then I was more involved with visuals, me and some artist friends of mine from San Francisco, we projected visuals using very cheap slides in our shows.

Blaine: It was, indeed. They started to have shows in very unlikely places. They had a show in this Mabuhay Gardens, a fairly famous rock venue in San Francisco, and it was a Filipino restaurant. A lot of people played there. I remember Devo, or Robin Williams also played there. Steven: It is very true. The music didn’t bother them (laughs). We played punk, we were loud. They didn’t care. They sold the beer.

Steven: No, we just played there a few times. Actually, first we went to London to record Desire (1981). That’s why we left San Francisco in the first place. Back from London, we passed by New York and spent some time there. We’d always go there for some shows and stay for like a month, but we never lived there, really. That’s why it is strange, in Downtown 81 we are the only not New York-based band because of Glenn O'Brien, a journalist who was the producer of the movie. He was a writer in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, and he featured us there. We were also friends with the DNA/Arto Lindsay, we went on tour together, and quite a few other musicians.
Blaine: Normally New York bands didn’t have a good opinion of Californian bands, but we were happy to see that we were accepted by very interesting people in New York. They considered us to be part of the New York scene. We were happy to be there, even if we didn’t live there (laughs). The Vicentines were there, Jim Jarmusch’s band, SQÜRL, The Lounge Lizards… this type of bands.

Steven: Both Blaine and I write Tuxedomoon’s music, it is all common. Usually the music comes first, but not always. Sometimes lyrics generate the music. Sometime the words have their own melody, that creates a theme. We can jam and later add arrangements, or add other instruments.

Steven: I don’t remember (laughs). No, it was great, our first time in Europe, we were amazed by how Europe treats artists like humans. We had dressing rooms, we had mirrors, and also people in the audience knew about us.

Steven: Bootleggers. And the actual record, maybe a hundred copies were enough to generate that spark.