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Martin Atkins
(July 2005 Issue)
Dangerous
Listening "I have an ability to bring people together, and that
gives me the opportunity to do something very
dangerous." So says
drummer Martin Atkins about Pigface, a rotating consortium of musicians
conceived of thirteen years
ago during a tour with industrial metal
forerunners Ministry and KMFDM. Atkins, who has lent his drumming
talents to Public
Image Ltd., Killing Joke, and Nine Inch Nails, among
others, has recently released Easy Listening, an engaging
collection of music and spoken word representing the latest Pigface amalgamation.
Though Pigface was originally identified
with industrial genre
artists, Atkins allows the band an open-door policy on the creative
front. Over thirty musicians - including
Chris Vrenna, members of Kittie,
The Rollins Band, and Dope - contributed to the making of Easy Listening. "The whole
idea of Pigface is still evolving," Atkins observes. "That feels so great to me."
Atkins" many years spent as a producer and
engineer have, naturally,
colored the way he approaches playing the drums. "I have my own
studio," he says, "so I engineer
my kit sound. If you listen to some of
those massively compressed, limited, overblown drum sounds on the
Pigface album,
you'll hear that I'm now more interested in the
processing rather than the tuning of the kit."
For live
performances, Atkins uses a five-piece Pearl set customized with electronic triggers. "That's just to
mentally
trigger a signature sound from an album track to put the listener in
that moment," he explains. "I'm
very interested in recreating the
"correct" energy of a song - and sometimes that means just one signature
sound, like a snare
drum crack'to put people in that head space."
Gail Worley
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