MACHINE GIRL

Fusing breakcore, hardcore punk, noise, rave, and more into something chaotic and hyper-emotional, Machine Girl has grown to be a one-of-a-kind alternative project that is special to many people. Originally founded by Matt Stephenson and joined by Sean Kelly on drums shortly after, MG are now a trio operating on full band format after the inclusion of guitarist Lucy Caputi, and they have their latest record, PsychoWarrior: MG Ultra X to prove exactly how strong they are in this incarnation.

The outfit kicked off their recent EU/UK tour on January 21 with a mindblowing show at The Button Factory. Right before the concert, I met the band backstage, and shortly after that, we found ourselves chilling and chatting at a restaurant nearby. The conversation became nerdier in the best way possible as time went by, and right before we were about to say goodbye, Matt said “Shout out to Istanbul!” as a final note after finding out I’m from there. Everything that came before that goodbye, you can read below.

How are you enjoying getting back on tour?

Matt: It just started, so it’s hard to really say. It feels like we haven’t stopped touring because we were just in Asia not even two months ago. It feels like a continuation of last year. We’re excited to be back in a lot of these cities and playing songs from Psychowarrior. Now that the album is out, people know the songs, and we’ve updated the set with some new old songs.

New old songs?

Matt: New old songs. It’s the first time Lucy’s playing some of these. We’re slowly updating the set. It’s changing constantly and getting better and better. It’s exciting to try new things. Tonight will be like a test.

What are some of your personal relaxation methods in routines where you don’t get to relax much, such as touring?

Lucy: Matt and Sean are going to saunas.

Sean: I listen to the same four or five songs over and over again sometimes, not on purpose. Weird stuff. 

Matt: On the older tour, I didn’t have my Switch with me. Last night I was like, “Man, I really wish I had it,” because I was so jet lagged. Coming from the US to Europe is always terrible. It fucks your sleeping schedule and your brain up. I was stuck in this middle zone where I didn’t want to go out, but also couldn’t sleep. I was like, “Damn, if I just had some video games instead of being on my phone.”

Lucy: Yeah. That's why I brought the laptop with Steam on it.

Matt: I have a couple games on my laptop, but having the Switch is better for me.

What games?

Lucy: Halo 2. 

Matt: Yeah. We started the Halo 2 campaign. There's a little gaming going on. Balatro is always in the rotation.

Speaking of Balatro, I've been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 with my friend for a while, but only the part where you play poker.

Matt: Oh, you can actually play poker? That's cool.

Sean: Before this tour, I was so deep in that game.

Looking back at the production of PsychoWarrior: MG Ultra X, if you had to pick one easiest and one hardest track to produce, which would they be?

Matt: Most of them were difficult. 

Lucy: I think ‘Dual Wield’ was easy.

Matt: Yeah, and I did the first track, “We Don’t Give A Fuck,” in one night, so that came together fast. The hardest were probably “Dread Architect,” “Ignore The Vore,” and “Psychowar.”

Music videos feel underappreciated in this day and age. I love your freaky, trippy visuals. What are some of your favorites?

Matt: Chris Cunningham’s Aphex Twin and Squarepusher videos, or anything from the ’90s.

Lucy: Michel Gondry’s videos, and Daft Punk.

Sean: Spike Jonze videos.

Matt: In high school, one of the careers I really wanted was to just be like a music video director. Nowadays it's possible, but it's very difficult to make enough money to get big enough. You have to do rap videos, and there's just not a lot of them. The budgets are really small. It used to be commercial directing. For any band, even a shitty band that already everyone forgot about, you'll find their music video from the 90’s, and it looks like a fucking movie. It’s super high budget. All the record labels had so much money. All that's gone.

Regarding Michel Gondry, I was obsessed with the video for ‘Star Guitar’ by The Chemical Brothers recently.

Lucy: That’s really good. I love “Let Forever Be,” where he puzzle-pieces each change in the music. It’s insane.

Matt: One of my favorites is also from The Chemical Brothers called ‘Electrobank’, which is not one of their big hits. It was one of their first singles, and it's by Spike Jonze starring Sofia Coppola as a gymnast doing a routine.

How chronically online are you? Do you follow podcasts or YouTube channels? You were recently guests of Danny Brown’s podcast. 

Matt: I mostly listen to news podcasts. I don't listen to people just bullshitting, like Joe Rogan.

Sean: I tried, almost ironically, but I could never make it through. 

Matt: Well, there also was a time period 10 years ago before he became really right wing.

A lot of people I knew did listen to him because he would have the UFO guys on or something.

Lucy: He does have interesting guests.

Matt: Sometimes, but now it’s too much Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

It's become a field for right wing tech bros. 

Matt: Yeah. I can't listen to that. But shout out to this Irish YouTuber, Bobby Fingers, who does crazily elaborate 20-30 minute videos where he makes really intricate dioramas, and then documentaries about him making the diorama and why he's making it. He made a Joe Rogan podcast diorama that took him six months. He did it because while Rogan was interviewing The Black Keys on his podcast, one of the guys brought up his YouTube channel. The length he went to accurately figure out exactly what type of fabric Joe Rogan was wearing that day is insane. He seeks it out and does unnecessary amounts of work to make his thing as accurate as possible. At the end of all his videos, he takes the diorama and buries it somewhere in the forest. Then, if you sign up for his Patreon, he geotags where it is. People will go dig it up and then sell the diorama online. He talks shit about The Black Keys by the way, he hates them.

Recently, I’ve been fascinated by the subject of dreams. Do you dream often, and do you keep dream journals?

Matt: Yes. I used to keep dream journals a lot more. I've fallen off. I should do it because I do have crazy ass psychedelic dreams. I dream that I'm in a dream, and I wake up multiple times and shit.

That's great. Or not great. You tell me.

Matt: It could be really fun. Or frustrating. I also had sleep paralysis for the first time in a while recently. I used to get it a lot.

I had it once. It's horrible.

Matt: It's terrible. You are stuck and it's really scary. I hallucinate voices and sounds. I hear people in the room with me and shit. If I was religious, I definitely would be like, “That's a fucking demon.” Actually, one time, I had sleep paralysis, was half asleep, and I was like, “Freddy Krueger is in the fucking room with me,” but I wasn't as scared as you would have thought. I was more annoyed. I just wanted to go to sleep, and he's just standing there and laughing at me.

When you said he was annoying, I imagined him using his claws like chalk to make noises on the wall.

Matt: Oh my god! That would be horrible.

So can you actually write your dreams down? Do you remember them after you wake up?

Matt: Yeah. In my notes on my phone, I have some dreams that I wrote down. I sometimes find those notes again and be like, “Damn, that shit's crazy.” I love writing down the dreams that I remember. They're less personal and more my unconscious going into a truly collective, deeper human archetypal level. Dreaming of giant mazes and stuff. I once had a dream where I walked into a public bathroom in an airport. I was attacked by someone and I fought them off. Then I looked in the mirror, and I was a really short Asian woman.

Sean: What the fuck?

Matt: I woke up right after. It was really trippy to see yourself as a completely different person. People are sometimes like, “Dreams are actually just windows into other parallel universes!” and there's that movie with a similar topic, Everything Everywhere All At Once. I thought it was great.

I can't write down my dreams, because I always forget them right after. That's partly why I wonder how people do it.

Matt: If you catch it a couple times, you start to remember them more. I definitely was remembering them a lot more after I did that for a week or two 15 years ago in college. I had read about a famous person doing that, so I was like, “I'm gonna do that.” I wish I was even more on top of it because if you do it all the time, you start to control your dreams.

Lucy: I have never done it.

Matt: There are techniques to know when you are dreaming. You can draw something on your hands, you look at it all day and ask yourself, “Am I dreaming?”

Was it Einstein that was holding a pen every time he was about to go to sleep?

Lucy: Maybe Da Vinci.

This one is about staying awake. Before you go into REM sleep, your body loosens up your muscles and you drop the thing in your hands so you can wake up. Getting the power nap, basically.

Matt: I think it was Salvador Dali. He would sit in a chair and fall asleep with a metal ball in his hands and a tray underneath him. He would drop it right as he was falling asleep, and then immediately he would start painting the last thing that he saw. Allegedly.

He seems like a crazy enough person to do that.

Matt: %100.

I think Batman did that as well in the comics. Speaking of that, when you think of it, Batman is pretty much a right-wing asshole.

Matt: Yeah. We gotta cancel him.

Lucy: I don't think he's a bad guy, honestly. He attracts a lot of negative discourse like he's an evil right-wing dude. I don't think he is. He's actually doing something pretty cool with his money, but he's doing too much.

Matt: (pointing at my Spongebob t-shirt): I love your shirt, by the way.

Thanks. What else would you like to say about your love of Spongebob? What does it mean to you?

Lucy: It's about being authentic.

Matt: When I talk, the things that I say without consciously thinking are constantly Spongebob quotes. 

Lucy: It’s totally embedded in culture at this point.

Sean: They took a lot of influence from Pee-wee Herman. It's so similar, which I didn't realize until recently.

Have you seen the first Spongebob film, The Spongebob Squarepants Movie? It is actually the canon finale of the show, because Stephen Hillenburg, the show’s creator, wanted it to end after three seasons, but the Nickelodeon people wanted it to continue because, obviously, it was making them money. So he just produced the film right after the first three seasons as the finale he had in mind.

Lucy: Of course. It's one of the most highly valued IPs ever. A big majority of Nickelodeon’s and Viacom’s revenue is literally just from Spongebob.

Matt: When I say “I love Spongebob!”, it is only the first three seasons and the movie. I never really watched anything after that.

Sean: The movie is also awesome.

I've seen some episodes after the film, and there was definitely a decline in quality.

Matt: It becomes way more for little kids. It’s not smart.

Or just weird, and not always in a nice way.

Matt: Yeah, I agree. Even as a kid, I noticed the shift. I remember seeing a new episode and realizing I didn't laugh once. I was like, “Oh yeah, the vibe is off,” which is a shame. I still think that specifically the first season is just a work of art. That was also the only season that was hand-animated. I love the look of it. It's so warm and comfy.

Sean: I love the backgrounds.

Matt: I think they also changed the characters later. In the first couple of seasons, Spongebob and Patrick are supposed to be more ambiguous young adults. All characters are parodies of working adults, or people you meet as adults. Patrick's a slacker, dumbass neighbor. Squidward is the older, jaded, angry guy who wants to be something more, but he's trapped at his shitty job. They changed it so that they were all like kids later on. At first, the joke was that they were adults who still liked doing little kid shit, like jellyfishing and blowing bubbles.

I will semi-object to that, and say that in the film, Spongebob and Patrick are established as kids. Everyone calls them kids all the time.

Matt: Yeah. That was probably the beginning of the change. One of my favorite bits from the movie, which again is a parody of the adult experience, is when they get drunk. They go to an ice cream bar and get really drunk from eating too much ice cream. The way it's portrayed is really cool, because you could actually have that adult experience. You get drunk and then you're cursing at your boss: “Fuck that guy!”

Let’s imagine we’re at a Musicians Theme Park 100 years from now, where every artist or band featured has their own memorial stone with a certain lyric by them written on it. Which one of the lyrics would you like to see written on Machine Girl’s stone?

Matt: I'm gonna give two answers: “We don't give a fuck,” and while technically not a lyric, “I was just an ordinary high school girl.” That’s from our first record. I feel like that's a very iconic line.

Nice. I ask this question to lots of artists, and the answers are always interesting.

Matt: When you have answers from enough artists, you should render all of it in a 3D game so people can walk through the memorials.