When you have a strong melody interacting between a rhythm 
guitar part and a vocal, that's more interesting. We like 
melodic lines, but to us the guitar solo is more athletic 
than melodic. We're integrating backwards guitar and 
texture guitar that together create a melody, but we're not
doing overt guitar solos, because they bore us. Some 
people are good at it--Billy Corgan is an excellent soloist-
-but that's not the way Rich and I play guitar. We're more 
into writing songs than showing off. Solos have been played 
out so much that you have to be a David Gilmour or Dave
Navarro to really do something new with it. 

"Metal has become a dysfunctional term," opines Brian 
Liesegang of Filter, a Chicago-based duo who fuse grunge-
style power riffs with precision grooves worthy of techno or 
house. "Genres have been bashed through the head. What is metal? 
What is alternative? What is Soundgarden? Are they alternative 
or are they metal? They certainly use loud guitars, but there's 
something there that defies the conventional metal genre. Maybe 
it stops being metal when there's a subject matter that requires 
some actual thought, although any time you play a loud guitar 
you're thinking with your dick." 

Some musicians live in an acoustically sealed vacuum, a world 
that consists only of guitars, bass, and drums. While that may 
work fine for them, I like to think that there should be no 
limits to what defines a musical instrument, or a melody. 
Practitioners of so-called "alternative" rock have a 
responsibility to redefine what is recognized as music by popular 
culture. In Filter, Richard Patrick and I work with a vocabulary 
that includes everything from feedback to bird calls. That's why,
when we recorded our album Short Bus, we didn't just run our 
guitars into amps, we patched them through a Macintosh as well.

 Don't get me wrong. Filter isn't a computer band. We're a 
guitar band that uses computers. I grew up toying with both 
Apples and amps. But I never imagined using them together until I 
talked my way into the University of Chicago's electronic sound 
studio. I discovered that with a computer and a modulator you could
manipulate sounds as if they were text. There were plenty of 
bands around in the late '80s who had already reached the same 
conclusion, but what they were experimenting with at the time-things 
like running a computerized bass line behind some guy singing through 
a distortion pedal-is pretty boring by now. It's important to use this 
stuff organically, to put across an emotion or some kind of fragment 
of life. To capture music that exists somewhere between lo-fi and the
digital world. With Short Bus, I think that's what we did.

 Thanks to computers, any kid with a little bit of money can now make 
records in his bedroom. Richard and I recorded most of the Filter 
album in his parents' basement on a Macintosh Quadra equipped with 
StudioVision Pro, a software program that essentially turns our 
computer into a digital eight-track. Along with a guitar amp and a 
microphone, we created sounds that would have been nearly impossible 
to capture in a studio. For instance, on "Hey Man, Nice Shot," we
found the bed of ambient guitar that's in the verses by scratching 
a guitar neck with a pick and looping the feedback through the computer. 
Listening to it later, we picked up some weird harmony in there, so we 
recorded it over multiple tracks and then figured out where it best 
supported the melody. The record is also loaded with a number of 
"happy accidents" that could never happen in the sterile confines of a 
studio. While we were writing "Stuck In Here," our toilet was broken and 
wouldn't shut up for three days. When it came time to record the demo, 
we realized something was missing. It was the sound of the toilet. We 
went back, broke it again, and ran that whizzing noise underneath the 
whole track. 

Our goal for the next album is to pack a PowerBook and whatever else 
we need into a Samsonite case and drive across North America, pulling 
over whenever inspiration strikes us. That way we can move around and 
encounter things, come up with more ideas, instead of just sitting on 
our asses and watching baseball games. 

 -BRIAN LIESEGANG