Project: Wiretapper is an up and coming solo-project, spawned from the cold heartless wastes of Richmond, VA, who splices old school industrial with contemporary ebm grooves. I caught up with P:WT shortly after the release of his debut "Brute Force Trauma". The debut isn't the best of all time but I think this kid has got potential, and he sure has a lot to say so read this shit already, would ya? For more information on the tapper of wires go here: http://www.myspace.com/projectwiretapper

Introduce yourself; who are you, what do you do?

My name is Nicholas Ring. I am known to most of the industrial community, thanks to Juan Monarez of Bajskorv at Nuclearfest 2007, as Nikolai the Revolutionary. I make industrial music under the name of Project: Wiretapper and my current occupation is a refrigeration mechanic. I currently live in Richmond, Virginia.

What is Project: Wiretapper / How did you come up with the name? Can you provide us with a brief bio? Why did you form Project: Wiretapper?

Brief? Sorry, not gonna happen.

Project: Wiretapper is an industrial project formed by me back in 2006. At first, I hate to say it, I wanted it to be trance mixed with metal. My earlier influences were Rammstein and Turmion Kätilöt, so it's obvious why. I soon got out of that rut once I got exposed to Front Line Assembly and Skinny Puppy. Now, PWT has evolved into a very in-your-face, harsh, pounding sound, something that seems to be absent from what's considered "industrial" these days. Project: Wiretapper is also my means of delivering political messages that no one wants to hear or see or think about - simply because most people don't even know about what's going on in the world today. Project: Wiretapper is only going to get better, harder, and more political from here on out.

The name Project: Wiretapper came around back when that whole wiretapping scandal was in the news. I was walking around in the Metro in D.C. one day in April of 2006 and saw a newspaper stand, and on the front page was a headline about Bush's illegal wiretapping program. At that point, I knew the name of my project had to be "Wiretapper." It was political in nature, but it also had a sort of electronic feeling that would somehow relate to industrial, at least in my mind.

Back when I was in my senior year of high school, I was in a symphonic black metal band called "Throne of Ice" (named after the Luca Turilli song on one of his solo albums). I was in this band for about a year or so, we had gone through 3 drummers, a bassist, and a vocalist, so for a long time it was just my friend Harrison and I. He played guitar and did vocals, I played keyboards. That was actually how I got into music at first, Harrison asked me if I could play anything and I knew my sister had this really old Yamaha in a closet somewhere, so that's how I started off.

Anyways, since it was just Harrison and I, I kinda got fed up after a while. He was calling almost all the shots and trying to assert himself as a frontman in my eyes, and I wanted the band to be more democratic in our approach. So after a while I started distancing myself from Throne of Ice (at this point it was known as Desecrated) and wanted to produce music of my own. I just had one problem. I didnt have any gear except a Yamaha PSR-450, and that wasn't good for industrial by any means. So I did what pretty much every industrial band these days does...

I bought a microKorg.

This was about May or so of 2006. I started messing around with synthesis, getting the hang of it, but never really did anything serious with it because I was always working with my uncle doing sound jobs for touring bands that came to the area. Then along came July 7, 2006. At exactly 6:30 AM on that day, the FBI raided my uncle's house while I was there, just getting up and getting ready for a sound job later that day. They held guns in my face and his, frisked us both down, and put us in handcuffs. Within less than an hour they hauled him off and that was the last time I ever saw him when it wasn't behind a pain of glass. Now he's serving a decade behind bars in Texarkana, Arkansas for a crime he didn't commit.

After my uncle was taken away from me, I was devastated. For two straight months, I would stay up until about 7 every morning and go to sleep, just to make sure the FBI wouldn't bust my door down. I was suicidally depressed and I'm not afraid to admit that. However, after staring Death in his single small black eye with a pointed metal pupil receded back a few inches, I told myself I wasn't going to make those bastards' jobs easy for them. That was exactly the motivation I needed for getting my project off the ground. It was my personal protest against the system that crippled me emotionally and mentally. It was my way of releasing all my anger and hatred towards the government.

What do you hope to achieve with the project / with music in general? What can be achieved through the medium of sound?

Revolution. Plain and simple. No bones about it. I want to show people what they haven't seen, tell people what they haven't heard, expose them to what they haven't felt. I want to instigate a change in society through my music.

I also want to help people remember what industrial was all about back in the day. Industrial was started off as a protest against what the music industry said music was supposed to be like. Now everything considered industrial is hard trance and danceable beats. Shit like Combichrist and VNV Nation isn't industrial and never will be. Industrial has lost it's "fuck you" punk edge, and I want to bring that back. I don't need to grow a fauxhawk and pick up pennies onstage to accomplish that, I need to get up in people's faces and get them to scream "FUCK SOCIETY!" along with me.

As for the medium of sound, I want my music to have a very militaristic, harsh feeling. I remember when I watched Fahrenheit 911 by Michael Moore, he did a part about the troops in tanks listening to music while they killed people. That's when I got this crazy idea of using music to invoke feelings of rebellion and a beat to go along with marching or high adrenaline combat. Of course it's been done before, but I'm tired of the same old club beats that are much more prominent than martial industrial music. "Uhn tiss" never made me want to kill something or bring down society, "uhn tiss" made me wanna have sex. That's counterproductive to what I want to accomplish.

What inspires you to write music?

Everything usually inspires me to write songs. I used to write love songs and poetry back in the day because I wasn't a pissed off, angry, bitter person at that time. Now I am. I can't write love songs or thoughtful poetry anymore, but I can write lyrics to political songs. I hate what this world is becoming and want to channel all of my undying madness into steering the course of humanity away from where it's headed right now.

Obviously you’re a very heavily political band and subsequently your lyrics are very politically charged. What inspires them and how do you go about composing them?

Usually, I will watch a documentary or a political movie and get ideas about what to write a song about. Hell, the movie doesn't even need to be political. I wrote a song about how the government has used us as test subjects for radiation and AIDS and LSD after I watched "The Hills Have Eyes." Most of the documentaries I watch aren't made by Michael Moore because I hate that fatass' ego. I watch documentaries like Loose Change, Zeitgeist, and anything by Alex Jones. If I feel like there's an issue that needs to be brought to everyone's attention, such as 9/11 being an inside job, secret societies, the military industrial complex, RFID chips, tazer use going out of control... I will write a song about. And use appropriate samples. Usually if I'm riled up about something I will get lyrics written within a week, usually to the beat or tune or a riff that's been fermenting in my head for a few weeks. And within anywhere between a week and a month, I have a rough draft of a song completed.

What was the process of recording your latest album “Brute Force Trauma” like?

Very low budget and low quality, I'm afraid. But I did get better the more I made songs. I think a lot of people can tell which songs I made first as opposed to the ones I made towards the end.

My process usually begins with recording a main synth riff from a hardware synthesizer to a simple drumbeat used as a metronome to keep on tempo. I then usually loop that riff and add on backing arpeggiators, more complex drum patterns, and sometimes pads or choirs in the background. Unfortunately, this was about it.

For my newer stuff, I plan on using a lot of complexities and variations. A whole lot more filter sweeping, a lot of ambient build ups, dynamic drum phrases, lots of panning between channels to create a surrounding effect, etc. There's a whole lot more I can do, I just never really delved into it as much as I should have in the past.

There are a lot of subtleties in “Brute Force Trauma” that I think people will miss. Can you mention some or all of them and how/why you decided to use them. Do you foresee this being a trend with P:WT releases?

Many of my subtleties lie in either song lengths or titles. Such as the title of the album itself, "Brute Force Trauma." Instead of the term "blunt force trauma," I replaced blunt with brute, as in the term "brute force." After the raid on my uncle's house, I was traumatized for quite a while. Having guns to your face when you're only 17 isn't the best experience in the world, it lives with you and haunts you for the rest of your life. That is the "brute force" my album's theme centers around - things the government has done to its citizens to bring us to our knees in submission. Taking away my family (They Took Him Away), tazing people for trivial crap (Tazed Again), sending our troops to fight for oil and inflated defense budgets and increased arms sales to the military (M-IC), killing almost 3,000 people on September 11, 2001 as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and bring forth fascist legislation such as the Patriot Act to label any dissent in America as not only unpatriotic but traitorous (Self Inflicted Wound, Voices From The Grave, What The Government Did)... these are all things that anger me to no end, and thus songs that have to be created to bring it to everyone's attention. As for song lengths, Novus Ordo and Voices From The Grave come to mind. Novus Ordo is about secret societies, but more specifically about the Bohemian Grove ceremonies that the elite attend - they burn a human effigy and read the ashes in some kind of weird ceremony, and then base decisions off of it. The length of the song, 3:22, is from the number found underneath the symbol for Skull and Bones, a secret society that both George W. Bush and John Kerry belonged to when they went to Yale University. The other song, Voices From the Grave, was 9:11 on purpose. I used samples from Farhenheit 911 (the crashing and screaming in the beginning), Alex Jones' Martial Law 9/11 (about the fires about to be put out), and Loose Change (the secondary explosions rescue workers felt at the towers). Some of these subtleties are hard to notice, others are kinda obvious, but the point of them being is that they are under your nose the entire time, they are registered by your subconscious like a subliminal message, but never fully comprehended until later. In my newer material coming up, I plan on having a lot more subtleties in the form of plays on words, such as Submission Accomplished, Brave New War, DeafEye, Hollow Caustic Lie, etc. And of course I'll mess around with the song lengths as well.

Being a very political person, how has living in the USA under the current regime of President George W. Bush affected you as a person? How has it affected the music of P:WT?

Regime. That's a good way to describe it. History repeats itself, my friend. Back in the days of Stalin, the KGB was founded. KGB stands for Komitet Gosudarstvyennoy Bezopasnosti, which, when translated, means "Committee of State Security." When Hitler rose to power, he created the Gestapo, which is an abbreviation of Geheime Staatspolizei, meaning "Secret State Police." Now, under the regime of George W. Bush, we have the Department of Homeland Security. Similar names, similar purposes - to keep us enslaved and afraid. To condition us into submission.

George W. Bush, in my opinion, is a political puppet. He's too much of a moron to make decisions for himself. He is a figurehead, someone the elite got into power to get their decisions made and their agendas put in place. Everyone in his cabinet, all of his daddy's buddies, all his connections in the military industrial complex and oil industries have a say in his policies. George W. Bush is the fall guy, the mask in which everyone truly making the decisions is hiding behind. So, when something goes awry (a.k.a, "public"), he takes the blame and the guy with the cloak and dagger exits the stage without being seen by the audience. It's nothing new, it's happened for the past several centuries, if not millenia. I'm not defending George W. Bush, I'm attacking the sons of bitches who put him in power and are staining the office of the Presidency with the blood of innocent people by manipulating him.

George W. Bush has had such a strong affect on my music that I don't even like using samples of him in my songs. I broke down when I wrote "Follow the Leader" because his moniker of, "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier," was perfect for the song and I couldn't find any samples of any other Presidents making a joke like that. Everyone else uses samples of him - Ministry, Flesh Field, and !Riothead! did, and :wumpscut: used samples of his dad... I didn't want his voice staining my music all the time, there are much better samples out there from movies and documentaries and senate hearings and so forth. I may as well sample Stephen Lynch's "Special Fred" if I want the voice of a retard in my music. That's how much I can't stand Bush's voice. By 2009, his ass is gone and then the song shows age. I want my songs to have a timeless quality, for the most part.

There are a lot of “political” bands out there from Napalm Death to Skinny Puppy. To be blunt, do you think people actually care about a band’s political stance and take it seriously? When I used to listen to Napalm Death I know that I was not inspired to act politically. What does it take for a band to make people open their eyes to that kind of thing?

Do people care about politics? Not really. America is plagued with complacency. I was that way when I was working for my uncle. I got a nice paycheck for my age so I was happy. I went out and bought synthesizers and audio gear to make music that I wanted to hear. I played video games in my spare time, if I had any. Then my uncle got taken away and it all changed. They fucked with the wrong guy.

Most people in this country live in a house or apartment with a TV, fridge, and a couch. Most people own and drive a vehicle because public transit in a lot of cities is atrocious, that and people are too damned lazy to walk. So as long as they have these basic luxuries, they are set in their minds. As long as the propaganda tube is entertaining them and feeding them full of lies, as long as the fridge is operating properly and keeping their perishables cold and their ice frozen, as long as their couch or bed is comfortable and their vehicle has 4 wheels and runs, people are content.

This, to me, is bullshit. People are so blinded by television and the corporate controlled media these days, George Orwell is doing cartwheels in his fucking grave. That's why no one cares about politics, because they are blinded. They don't have someone grabbing them and shaking them and yelling "WAKE THE FUCK  UP!" They don't have the FBI holding guns in their faces and taking their family away like Nazis. They don't have a unified purpose, they don't have a cause to fight for. They have their TV diners and Martha Stewart  cookware and plasma TVs. Once you begin to take these things away from them, they will get pissed. No one cares that their rights have been taken away by the Patriot Act, no one cares that they are being watched and monitored relentlessly by the NSA and DHS, no one cares that their friends and relatives are being sent overseas for massive profits for the armaments industry. Why doesn't anyone care? Because they either don't know or don't see how it implicates them and their life. I plan to reverse this.

Some of my favorite political songs ever are by Front Line Assembly, simply because Bill Leeb doesn't beat around the bush when he wants to get a message across. Songs like "Gun" and "Division of Mind" just speak to me on a spiritual level. In the song "Gun," he talks about what seems to be a rebellion with "March to the rhythm, fists in the air, statues torn down, burning flags everywhere" - then he goes into saying "Kneel to the man who's pointing the gun." That is exactly what I did when the FBI raided my uncle's house, I got on my knees and locked my fingers behind my head, just like in the movies, just like on TV. It was like I was programmed to do it. In "Division of Mind," Leeb screams "This fascist nation never rests" and the first chorus is "Fight back!" Of course it may seem cheesy the way I'm tearing the songs apart, but this is the kinda stuff we need. Something that does not sit there and say "Oh, we can stage a protest or put a bumper sticker on our car and hate the war and things will all end peacefully and everyone will love each other." No. It's not going to happen like that, quit lying to yourselves.

I think a lot of bands flirt with the idea of being political. Bands like Green Day that'll do one song like American Idiot but the rest of the songs are shitty pop punk songs about stuff that thousands of songs have already been made about. Rammstein does the same thing, I'm afraid, one song will be about something political, like their song "Benzin" about society's addiction to gasoline, but the rest of their songs are about sexual metaphors. At least with bands like Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, they will do entire concept albums at some points and just really blow me away by going all out, Ministry especially. But still, a lot of bands flirt with the idea of being political, they will still do songs about drugs and sex and girlfriends. It gets very old and very annoying after a while. And bands that are political, such as KMFDM, use too many metaphors in their songs and are never direct enough. Their song, Anarchy, is one of my favorite songs to listen to, but it's all metaphors. No names, dates, places, events. All in all, I don't think anyone out there has enough balls to get out there and say what needs to be said, and say it in a way that'll get people's attention. I have a lot of respect for Al Jourgensen of Ministry for his past several albums worth of seething political songs, I have some respect for Trent Reznor for his album Year Zero, but at the same time I feel something is missing from these creations. There's not enough anger, not enough specifics, not enough drive. That's where I come in. I make songs about very specific events, very specific concepts. I don't put my toe in the water, I jump in the fucking pool. Metaphors can wait for a Pax Americana. I have no reputation to lose, I'm not afraid of going all out.

In short, my plan with Project: Wiretapper is to grab you and scream in your face and tell you what's wrong with society and this country and this government, then spit you back out in the crowd. If I don't see your fist in the air, I will wash, rinse, and repeat until I do. I will play every sample you don't want to hear, I will project every piece of political footage you don't want to see, and I will crush your head with my boot O'Brien style until you resist.

Remember, it was John Lennon himself that said, "Flower power doesn't work."

Are you planning any live performances with PWT? If so, what can we expect?

You bet your ass I am. Even if I have to get out there as one man, as lame as that can be sometimes, I'll still do it. People need it. I need it. This is what I was born to do.

How is the scene in your hometown Richmond, VA?

Dead. No, that's not entirely true. But it could be a whole lot better.

We have goth nights at Mars Bar in Shockoe Bottom every Wednesday night. The DJ there is gracious enough to play Skinny Puppy every once in a while. And then there's Sacrosanct at the Rocks on Monday nights. But in terms of there being bands that play industrial music in Richmond, there is only one that comes to mind - Synthetic Nightmare. One of their former members, Caleb, went to church with a former drummer of Throne of Ice, which is how I got exposed to Synthetic Nightmare (remember, I was in high school at this point, the only industrial I knew of was Rammstein). Since then, I wanted to make industrial music myself. It was like... woah, these guys are great, and they're local, too! They play a lot of shows with a lot of out of town synthpop groups like Bella Morte and Synthetic Division, but usually tend to tag along metal acts here in Richmond to their shows. The scene in Richmond, when it comes to live shows rather than goth nights and DJs, is being kept alive by Synthetic Nightmare alone, and I sincerely thank them for that. My friend Jameson is in Iraq right now on a much different kind of tour, but when he gets back, he will pick up his project, Order of March. So hopefully, in the next year or so, Richmond will see some more industrial projects pop up and get real serious about playing live instead of staying in the basement confining themselves to Fruity Loops and Myspace.

If you could change something about contemporary industrial culture what would it be?

Shit like Combichrist and Mindless Self Indulgence being considered "industrial." I mean, come on people! Where has the punk edge gone? Where has the blistering attitude opposing society gone? That's what I want back in industrial. Fuck Hot Topic, fuck Spencer's, and above all, fuck Marilyn Manson.

What are the top albums that inspire you?

Tactical Neural Implant - Front Line Assembly

Psalm 69/ Rio Grande Blood/ Rio Grande Dub(ya) - Ministry

Scars and Stripes - Bajskorv

Mutter - Rammstein

Manufactured Dreamscapes - Synthetic Nightmare

Revelations - Red Angel Dragnet

What are the top books that inspire you?

1984 - George Orwell

It Can't Happen Here - Sinclair Lewis

Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

V for Vendetta - Alan Moore

Prey - Michael Crichton

What are the top movies that inspire you?

The Matrix

Fight Club

V for Vendetta

Equilibrium

What is currently on the PWT agenda and what can we expect from you in the future?

Currently, there are three things on my mind to do for Project: Wiretapper.

1.) Redo my entire first album and make it better than ever.

2.) Work on new material for my second and third albums.

3.) Get a live keyboardist for shows.

Thanks for taking the time to do this interview and Wounds of the Earth wishes Project: Wiretapper much success in the future!