This album was delayed like five days in the making because Kevin Shea my collaborator had a cold. The only reason it exists is because it is a funny ass idea. I’m vaguely annoyed at a PI I work with because he hasn’t responded to some e-mails on cases that kind of matter. The Infomercial album is delayed like five days because Shea has a cold? If you saw what it was I was actually working on you would see the trivia of it. In a more general sense, the idea of being an artist has less currency for me than it once did. I now belong to the John Birch Society which is largely considered a right wing extremist group and people who describe themselves as “artists” tend to be overwhelmingly leftist. I also work in a field outside of the arts, that being the PI field. That’s okay though, it doesn’t matter that much because they just put professional boxing back on network TV after 30 years, so it’s more affordable to be a boxing fan than a hipster.
I can’t honestly say how much interest is going to exist in this project, but I think the one way people are going to understand Infomercial is as Kevin Shea’s industrial project, Kevin being probably better known as a jazz musician than anything else at this point. That might be the best way to handle the promotion of it, goth and industrial music have a long standing following in Europe where Kevin tours frequently. The impetus to go a more industrial route for this music came from Kevin not myself. I originally I was just going to throw some John Birch Society audio over some disco beats as a joke. When I sent it over To Kevin to re-mix that it turned more into an industrial band. I actually grew up in high school listening to a lot of Joy Division, Nine Inch Nails, compilations put out on Cleopatra Records. The same is not true of Kevin at all so far as I know. I’ve known Kevin over a decade I’ve never heard anything to that effect.If I had to think about it Ian Curtis and Trent Reznor are probably as good musically as it gets, but again. When I was a teenager there where these t-shirts for the band Chemlab that had the slogan “Fuck Art, Let’s Kill” around everywhere, but I wonder where the money from those t-shirts went, because then first year of college my roommate ended up working with the drummer from Chemlab at a telemarketing place as i recall. My feeling though is that if you actually dug up a Chemlab album- which is easy and inexpensive to do in this day in age, it’s probably a decent enough rock and roll album. That may not sound like a lot but you have to understand when I was in my twenties in New York everyone was in some excremental band or making fecal music no one cared about in an effort to get famous. There was that woman who called herself Reign I met at the cybercafe on Avenue A. I got her phone number by offering to introduce her to musicians or getting an interview with her placed in a music zine. I called her one day and she was saying something like “I can’t talk right now I’m going into record”. Boy to think I could have interrupted the creation of that musical masterpiece she made that exploded and changed music forever. Man, I hear her music everywhere I go. Don’t you? She really built an empire. That band Front Line Assembly was on those Cleopatra Compilations they have as much as a 100,000 hits plus on some tracks. - William Wheaton