Since 1990, Ben Watkins' globalized art and music collective Juno Reactor has churned out a generous helping of tribal dance music experiments that willfully mash the postmodern and the primitive.
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Accordingly, Juno Reactor's narcotized body-rocking music has gone widescreen in flicks like Virtuosity, Romeo and Juliet and more, including all three installments of The Matrix as well as Japanese films like Brave Story and the recently released Dimension Bomb. He's currently working on a project with Japanese animation legend Koji Morimoto, who in turn created the cover art for Juno Reactor's recently released effort Gods and Monsters.
Forget culture clash. Juno Reactor is all about the culture crash.
Listening Post caught up with Watkins via e-mail from the road, where his eye-popping European tour is well underway, about postmodern primitives and why cinema soundtracking has no balls.
Wired.com Listening Post: You have experience in The Matrix. What is the postmodern primitive?
Ben Watkins: I have been inside to the core of The Matrix. It was a journey, a mission to obtain and extract its sound, but no sound could I hear, just the buzzing of a fridge, a mumbling Hoover, the sound of an earthquake coming. The postmodern primitive? I have met all four of them, and they are in my band, pictured below.
LP: What kind of technology does it take to get this type of spacetracking off the launch pad?
Ben Watkins: A simple electrical cable, with as much energy as we need, and no more. Plus, 12 chickens, calamine lotion and one stick of eye makeup.
LP: Your music has been used pretty extensively in film. What does it offer cinema?
Ben Watkins: The possibility to make the world of moving image a better place to be. And to stop all the bland corporate orchestral gonads and replace them with gems of imagination.
LP: This disc veers from heart-attack anthems to freaked out dub and jazz.
Ben Watkins: Freaked out? Heart attack? Ummm, not in my mind.
LP: Fair enough. What do I need to do while listening to it?
Ben Watkins: A car, petrol and a long road is all you need. The sweet perfume of a distant horizon.
LP: You're a wired dude. What's the future of the music industry as we know it?
Ben Watkins: There is no future, only this moment. The future is not worth looking at. Just the present – and picture postcards.
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Photos: Ben Watkins
