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Steven Gillis
(September 2005 Issue)
Filter's Power
Source Steven Gillis was
five when he stumbled upon a drumset in a neighbor's basement,
discovering the
instrument that would become his life's passion. "I
started banging on these drums and it just zapped me,"
he
admits. "I knew from that point I'd be playing for the rest of my life.
Since college, I've made my living solely
playing music. I've never had
a day job."
Gillis, who counts Tony Williams and Dennis Chambers among his
biggest
influences, was playing over three hundred gigs a year in various
Chicago-based jazz bands when he joined alternative
hard rockers Filter
on the verge of recording their second album. Five years later, Filter
are touring in support of their latest
release, Amalgamut.
Because they're from Chicago, home of the industrial-minded Wax Trax
studio, and
because vocalist Richard Patrick once worked with Nine Inch
Nails, Filter often gets rubber-stamped an industrial band. But
Gillis
insists this label is misleading. "Maybe the first album had an
industrial flavor," he concedes, "but the press puts that
stamp on us
because it's easy, not because it's true. Listen to the records:
There's great songwriting in this
band.
"I don't think that there's any song on Amalgamut
that's heavy just for the sake of
being heavy," Gillis continues. "So
I Quit is our ode to Ministry and is fun to play live. But on every
other tune there's
something being said. It's not fluff at all; we're
trying to write songs that people can have their own relationship
with
and interpret in different ways. We do what we feel is necessary
musically to represent the
song."
Gail Worley
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