Q&A with an avant-garde Swiss army knife

IS: You're pretty much the general on the X-Ecutioners record. But how does it work when you have three other musicians who are really talented and have ideas as well, like in Fantomas, in communicating what you want to do as a composition?

MP: In a way sometimes collaborating is more difficult because you have to listen (laughs). The composing is kind of done in advance. This is long before you go into the rehearsal room or the studio or any of that. All the real work is done. And that's done alone. My canvas is the studio. I'm not a trained musician, I can't write stuff down on paper, other than a few little pictures to trick my mind into remembering certain things. But basically, the only way of documenting my s--- is by pressing record. So I spend a lot of time in the studio and I really write a lot of the stuff in the studio, especially with the X-Men stuff. I knew vaguely what I wanted it to sound like.  I knew that I wanted four or five different approaches on there but I didn't really know how to execute it until I was in the studio and doing it and going “No that's wrong and yes this is right.” So in a way, a record like that, there's more than two cents, there's like six or eight cents. There's a lot more information to digest and process and a lot more egos to massage and a lot more visions to accommodate.

IS: That's the hard part, it seems to me. Accommodating people's visions. In a way, it's kind of like middle managing or something, where you have to kind of give them a little breathing room for what they want but then go “wait, no, I gotta do it like this.”

MP: Well, yeah, even in Fantomas, where I do write everything and tell them what to do and they do it, they always do it better than I tell them to! It's always better than I imagine. So in a way, they're really putting their own stamp on it no matter what. I try and write solos for everybody, keep everybody happy, not focus too much on one guy, you know. You gotta make sure that everyone's personality is accounted for. But you know, once I started getting to know these guys, I started writing for those personalities. Once I realized how great Dave's (Lombardo, formerly the drummer from Slayer) feet were, I wouldn't let 'em rest (laughs). There's constant double bass.

IS: I don't personally have a ton the X-Ecutioners’ records, but I can't tell where you start and they end and vice versa.

MP: That's great! Mission accomplished then. Because a lot of that stuff really is editing. Some of it's straight up samples. Some of that is entire tracks that they did and I just added some instruments to.

IS: Let's get specific, if you don't mind geeking out on this thing. The middle third of that record sounds like it's all you. It's all short bits and really interesting instrumentation and samples. There are a couple of tracks like “Vaqueros y Indio” and “Precision Guided Needle Dropping” and stuff like that where it is bump-and-grind, stop-start composition. What kind of role did they play on that?

MP: The "Vaqueros" one is actually pretty much a complete Latin tune that they scratched over. And it was not so filled out. I added a bunch of instruments to it and I processed the living hell out of it and added vocals, obviously, and the cut up pieces on either side of that. They sent me a bunch of sound effects that they were scratching. I used those, put them on top of other little ideas that I had. It was really kind of a musical yard sale, really. There's a lot of different things going on there.

IS: And conversely, there are tracks on there like “Kamikaze! (Take a Piece of Me)” where it sounds like they produced something for you and then you just went on top of it.

MP: For the most part I arranged it. It was only a couple of bars long and I kind of made a song out of it. Came up with a chorus and a verse, added some guitars and other instruments and that was it. But yeah that's their thing, that's them. I wanted to make sure there was a tune on there that was obviously beat juggling cause that's really their forte.

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