This interview first appeared in the October 2004 issue of ANTIGRAVITY and was conducted by former AG writer Miles Britton (who’s now an editor at MAGNET!).
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Singularity, Ratty Scurvics’ one man music project, has for the past two years been building a loyal and ever growing fan base thanks to his darkly hypnotic songwriting and intense stage presence. Dressed up in his signature clown costume, his face painted stark white, stabbing simultaneously at the keyboard, drums and microphone with a glowing cigarette clamped between his teeth, Scurvics gives us a glimpse of what Brian Eno might have sounded like if he had run away to join the circus. ANTIGRAVITY sat with Ratty and chatted with him about rock operas, the Know Nothing Zircus, and trying not to bleed at the Hi-Ho.
ANTIGRAVITY: How did the Singularity project come about?
Ratty Scurvics: I was in the mood to write a rock opera. So I composed all these songs centering around these certain characters and stories. That’s where the clown originated. In the beginning, I was pretty strict about doing the sequence of songs as they would occur dramatically, but I’ve kind of left that behind me.
AG: What was the plot of the rock opera?
RS: It all took place during World War I, on the northern Italian border. There was an affair going on between an Austrian solider and an Italian girl. Later on, she turned into a trench whore. It was pretty common at the time for village girls to sneak into the trenches at night and screw the soldiers for cash. She ends up getting shell shocked. While she’s freaking out she comes across this mass grave where all these soldiers have been thrown in, and there’s light all over them. And she thinks she’s come across this great toy box, this stash full of baby dolls. So she runs down there and she starts making them all up, pretending like they’re her baby dolls. That’s what the clown is. The clown is one of those baby dolls.
AG: Did you originally plan for it to be a one-man band?
RS: Not really. That began as a necessity. When I started working on Singularity, I didn’t have a multi-tracker to work the ideas out with. So I set up a bunch of instruments so I could play them all at once. It ended up being a lot of fun. I played a couple of shows like that and it over really well, so I thought to myself, “Why put a band together? Fuck it. I don’t need one.”
AG: Do you feel limited by the fact that you have to play all the instruments yourself?
RS: God, no. Not at all. In fact, it’s liberating. You make all the decisions. You can change key in the middle of a verse if you feel like it. You don’t have to worry about anybody else stumbling to catch up with you. You’re only limited by your ingenuity. But it’s got to sound like a whole band. I don’t want it to be kitsch. I don’t want it to be a novelty act.
AG: It’s funny how one guy on stage with an acoustic guitar can get away with it, but once you incorporate another instrument you’re automatically labeled a novelty act.
RS: Yeah. I’ve thought about naming each one of my limbs and just saying I’m a band.
AG: Explain your set-up a bit.
RS: My set-up? It’s precarious. [Laughs] Right now, it’s basically a bass drum with two keyboards on top and a snare turned on its side with a kick pedal. I like keeping things simple. I like the immediacy of it. But I had to do a lot of experimenting to get it right. And there’s always the element of danger of the whole thing falling apart.
AG: I heard you toured with the Know Nothing Zircus for a while.
RS: Yeah, for about seven months. I met them while I was on tour [as music director] with the circus troupe the End of the World, and they asked me to join. At the time I was just in the mood to throw all responsibility off my shoulders, so I just said, “Fuck it all, I just want to be drunk and play guitar every night in a different city.” And that’s exactly what I did for seven months. I loved the recklessness with them, the contained recklessness, the complete lack of structure. It was the same thing that I liked about playing with Coprolingus.
AG: Coprolingus?
RS: Yeah. It’s Latin for “shit licker.” That band was out of control. We were doing a lot of noise work. Heavy drumming, short wave radios, hand-built instruments, lots of contact mikes, that sort of thing. We got eighty-sixed from every bar in Dallas and Austin. That’s why whenever we came down here to play New Orleans, we would always play at the Hi-Ho. Maria was running the place back then, and she didn’t care. She told me once, “As long as there’s no blood, I don’t care what you guys do.”
AG: When did playing as a one-man band come about?
RS: I fucked around with it a lot in the past. When I was touring with the End of the World, one day all the musicians quit to go to Burning Man. We had a show that night in Montana, at some weird casino/cafeteria. Since we didn’t have any other musicians, I set the base drums on stage and put the keyboards on top of it. And I loved it. I was really disappointed about three shows later when some of the musicians showed up. I was already set up on stage and one of them came up to me and was, like, “Ratty, what’s up, man? Why you have the whole drum set over there? Come on, I want to play!” [Laughs] Honestly, I don’t know if I could ever go back to playing with a band. I’m just having too much fun.
Interview by Miles Britton; This interview originally appeared in ANTIGRAVITY Vol.1 #5 (October 2004). Find out more about Ratty Scurvics’ Singularity at his MySpace page.
