The simple fact is, the guitar will always be on top here in America. Its like that good old redneck bumper sticker they sell in pairs with shotgun racks, "You can take my gun only after you pry it from my cold, dead hand". Insert the word guitar in there somewhere and we're seeing eye to eye. As a collective mass of millions, we will never be as open minded as Europe, thus we will never match their level of innovation or acceptance. From the Beatles and Pink Floyd to punk rock, metal and the birth of techno, time and history have proven this over and over again.

Within this situation, some still prefer to cut against the grain. These are bands that don't seem to care what's hip and what's not in their surrounding market. Electronics with a heavy dose of content are a great formula for retail suicide in America if you're not doing techno. A handful of the groups charging towards a change of face include Scar Tissue, Xorcist and Battery.

Battery, in particular, are probably the most un-hip of the group as their music is purely electronic with about as much testosterone in it as you'd be able to scrape up at a feminist convention. Their compositions revolve around a mixture of both male and female vocals with electronics, leaning towards more deep keyboard tones and moving passages held together by a steady hard-hitting beat. They'll kick your ass just as hard on the dance floor, but some tracks will lead to higher levels of introspection and mood alteration. Its a basic dynamic formula that most bands too consumed with constantly bludgeoning you miss out on. Their antitheses to this tactic is rampant throughout their catalog, which consists of the "Eternal Darkness" 12", "Meat Market" and "Lilith 3.2" EPs and the "Mutate" and "nv" full albums. Working as the trio of Maria Azevedo, Shawn Brice and Evan Sornstein through most of these releases, Battery have proven time and time again that you can add a touch of beauty and mysticism without losing your edge on the dance floor one bit. Living just a few minutes away from the U.S. offices of COP Intl in the San Francisco Bay Area, Battery are a testament to individuality and endurance in both the global and local markets. In their own words....

How do you feel you've progressed from "Meat Market" to "nv"?

EVAN: I think we've learned the importance of drama for one. Changeability and orchestration have also improved. When we first started doing the industrial thing, we always had a hard time coming to terms with a lot of the angst that was pervasive in the music. We weren't angry people. I mean, we had our own internal conflicts and everyone has their own problems, but it wasn't the same kind of anger. We really liked the music because it had a wonderful energy that we were really interested in, so we emulated it as much as we could but it just wasn't there for us. I think we've come to terms now with what we care to express without it being an extension of the genre. I think we've taken ourselves more out of the genre and into our own little realm.

Where did your love for music, computers and electronics first start out?

Shawn: Mine came when I found one of those old console/radio/cassette/record player things. I found that if I put a tape in and pushed all the buttons in at one time it made this dreadful noise. I recorded a tape of that and just listened to it for hours. I also found that if I broke off the little belt on the record player I could do all this backwards stuff. I don't know, it came really naturally, just walking down the street I become fascinated by all the little rhythms. It started with video games and playing too much of them.

I heard you mention the term "industrial/goth" before. Is that what you like to consider Battery?

Maria: Its so hard when people ask us what kind of music we do when we say we're in a band. We've said everything from electro to digi-goth [sounds like Chase talking] and I think we've even used darkwave in an ad once. When you think of industrial, I wouldn't say we are a pure industrial band. There is no single word to describe all of the music that we do, so I think we need to go into long descriptions sometimes.

How did you guys find Maria?

Shawn: It all happened after a dreadful show at Drug #6 [a long defunct SF club] where I basically had a nervous breakdown. Just about that time, Evan's sister had just come back from London and said she had met somebody who was this great singer. One of the clinchers for hiring her came when we had a show with Pressurehead and Voice of Destruction. It was about five minutes before the show and Maria came up and said she wanted to sing on this one song. The sound guy wasn't ready yet and she was standing about fifteen feet away from me but I could still hear her singing her guts out through my monitor so I knew then she was cool enough. Having Maria on-stage gives us a lot more confidence and we're all able to bounce energy off each other so we don't feel as lonely.

Maria, how has your input and direction changed throughout time?

Maria: It's a whole process where they come up with the rough sketches, I come in and do my thing, and then they go and mix it. From the bare sketches, I find some keys and drum lines to start off with, then we work on things together and decide what should go where. I write words and batches of songs before I go in, but I don't work on any of the music. When I first joined the band, I knew nothing about being in a band or singing with other people. I didn't even know these two guys so I was really self-conscious. I had a hard time doing anything emotional at first. If you listen to "Mutate" compared to "nv", I think there's a huge jump. I couldn't whisper in front of them, I couldn't yell, I couldn't sound angry or sad in the beginning. So with tracks like "Go" [one of Maria's more angry moments], I sent them out to see "Dracula" one night and I bought a bunch of wine coolers and sat at the mixing board by myself getting smashed. When they came back, they listened to it and Shawn gave me a great big hug and said, "I knew you could do it!" I think that was the breaking point.

Do you find it hard fitting onto bills with all these guitar oriented bands?

Maria: No, that's kinda one of the big rules of the band, NO GUITARS! I know Deathline International play with guitars, and I think that's neat, but I've never really been close to the guitar because we've never really been around them. Shawn has his little portable keyboard that he runs around with and I think that's visually stimulating enough. That's one of the reasons I like being in the band. Its digital music and I love it.

Do you think rock music is dead?

SHAWN: I definitely thing rock music has been dead for a while. I don't really think it has a place. This is if you mean music with no electronics at all. Even with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", they did so many cool manipulation tricks on that, I'm amazed. I think it was on the second verse, they had this feedback noise that they tried to do a Sex Pistols thing with having feedback over the verse. They hit two bars of it and then time scaled it over the whole verse to keep the same pitch. Even things like "MTV Unplugged", I'm sorry, that was not unplugged! They've had these $2,000 microphones, these $10,000 harmonizers and all this totally expensive equipment just to make them sound good. I guess I consider that to be electronic music as well. I don't know if the rock music thing will ever really truly die. Its like something Evan said, there is something infantile about the guitar which is also very alluring. Its like Beavis and Butt-Head, I don't think its going to die for a while.

What about the instruments you use?

EVAN: We've got a bunch of rack stuff and a few keyboards, but its a growing thing. When we first started we only had a couple of keyboards and we did what we could with them. When we could afford to buy something more, we'd max out our credit cards and go for it. One thing that is very important to us is that we don't use any keyboard presets. As far as samples go, we want to use our own sounds and use them our own way to create our own richness. None of this "Oh! that's one of the presets from the Wavestation!" The Wavestation, for example, is an excellent synthesizer, so you'll hear preset patches from it all the time. Presets are made well, they're EQ'd well, they're easy to fit into an orchestration because they fit in the niche easily so you hear them often.

What about your sampling choices and techniques?

EVAN: With drum sounds, we always make our own kits. On a particular album, we'll build a drum kit for every one or two songs but most of the time each song has it's own kit with its own special sounds. Those are sounds we make ourselves mixed from anything we can find and tweak or destroy on the computer. As far as text samples go, when we first started before we had Maria, we were relying on movies, radio and television sources. There's a certain amount of that which is still there for us. It's still important because it's an expression and reference people can respond to. Even if you don't know the movie, it still has an effect. If you do know the movie, it makes a big deal because it's bringing in the whole reference to that movie. It's almost like a T.S. Eliot poem.

What about the legalities behind sampling movies?

EVAN: We've tried to do it less and less because we're going to run into trouble with it as we get bigger. We've tried to make more and more of our own samples now, which is a difficult process because we're not actors. Shawn is the movie fiend, and I don't know where the hell he gets most of his samples from. He just sits and watches movies and collects samples, so we have this huge library of screams, cries, yells and different words. When we were working on a song, we'd just go to the library and see if we could find that perfect sample. We need to shy away from that because copyright laws are getting harder and harder. Before, it was easier being a small industrial band alongside all the million or so other small industrial bands sampling from "Blade Runner" and so on. No one is really going to care because you're not going to make money off it and no one's ever really going to hear it anyway. I'd rather use the samples for their particular reference value than their expression, because I'd rather leave that up to us. If you don't then the samples become a crutch.

How much vocal processing do you use?

MARIA: There was a lot of processing with the first album on all the "girl songs" as they call them. I think that was just because none of us really knew what we were doing back then. As we've gotten to know each other better, I think we've used less processing. Now we're starting to get back into using it more for variety because we went through a phase of not using very much. So we're rediscovering it again.

How do you decide which tracks will have male or female vocals on it?

MARIA: Whoever writes the song sings it. If Evan writes some words or Shawn gets inspired and writes some whacked out song, they'll work on it. Usually, we'll write things down and show them to one another. Sometimes, they give me sketches, and other times I'll already have words, but we know who's going to sing the songs pretty quick. Other times, Shawn will be writing a song and say, "OK, I want Maria to sing la la la here", so I go and add some things sometimes.

What were the early days with C.O.P. International like?

SHAWN: It was started by these two German guys who were taking their vacation in beautiful, sunny San Francisco and on a nice warm summer night we handed them an invite to our show. So they went to the show and requested a free tape because at this point they were just thinking about starting a label. They were very nice guys, so we went for it. It was basically us and Diatribe at first. So we both did some recordings. The Diatribe was "Therapy" and we did "Eternal Darkness". Ours came our first because it was on vinyl. We tried telling them vinyl was dead, but they didn't seem to believe us. The reason why C.O.P. was set up here near San Francisco is because it was Christian's [C.O.P.'s founder] favorite place to live. C.O.P. also has a spin-off techno label, which probably pays for a lot of C.O.P. these days.

With C.O.P. having offices in Germany and in the U.S., which one is more successful?

EVAN: We sell more in Germany. The business aspects like the pressing and distribution come from Germany. It's hard distributing it through American companies because no one is buying enough of it and they don't have the security of a lot of numbers in this market. Most of the distributors will only take fifty or a hundred copies at best, and it's really hard to cover the entire world with 1,500 CD's.

What's your weather forcast for industrial's future?

EVAN: We've all been through the last five or six years of hearing a lot of Skinny Puppy remake bands. These are bands that take aim at the style and form Skinny Puppy used in writing songs. It's not a verse, chorus, verse, chorus type thing it's more linear and keeps going. They're also imitating a lot of the vocal processing. It's like anyone can sing these days as long as it's through a distortion box but they lose some of the expression Skinny Puppy had. There are a lot of bands now who have been through all of that, so I think we're going to get more of the Nine Inch Nails thing. The subject matter changed with more traditional and accessible production values. I think it will dissipate, industrial music does not mean what it used to mean. It hasn't meant what it used to mean for such a long time. I think people are starting to shy away from the terminology unless they really are an industrial band from the "old school" whether it be from the Skinny Puppy, Throbbing Gristle or Test Dept. eras.

How many more albums do you think you've got left in you?

MARIA: Oh! Many! We get along so well! We'll go for 20 more years and be the Rolling Stones of industrial/goth!