BIEGERT: He's really into that Big Blackalbum. Songs about fucking.

RAGANO: Yeah, Peter wants to give lifeto every woman on Earth.

15 MINUTES:How has the band maturedmusically?

MOORE: The technology we had at the timemight have defined our sound somewhat. Theequipment that we had, the technology we hadavailable, with the money we had then--the way youcould use it and sound cool was making that kindof music. Like with Jeff's drums. He had a moreprimitive version of an electronically triggereddrum set.

LANCTOT: Things that had acharacteristic sound to it, like an analog drummodule, might have some characteristic sound. Nowwe've got more instruments, and the samplinginstruments are more the sampling, flat sound,true reproductions of sound. So hopefully, youdon't hear the instrument; you just hear thesound.

MOORE: With Jeff's drums--well, he's inhock for the rest of his life--we've gone intodebt getting stuff, but he can call upon anymyriad of sounds that are much truer reproductionsof say, a tabla, or a talking drum from Africa.You can get a wider palette. Therefore, we can dosome-thing like, say, "Rattlesnake," a realBeatle-esque type of song, because we can mimicthat better with the type of instruments we havenow. We can sound more would musicy more ethnic,because we have the technology to imitate thoseinstruments better than we could in 1987.

RAGANO: In other words, we can express asong more the way that we want to hear it now,because we have better technology. The stuff wehad used to dictate the way we sound, but thestuff's so sophisticated now that you can soundany way you want--bigger a lot more convincing.

15 MINUTES:What's your attitudetowards pop? For instance, "Rattlesnake" isgetting airplay. How is your musical repertoireaffected by the knowledge that there is that onepop song on the album?

RAGANO: It's a thorn in our side. No,really, it's just another challenge. We thought,why not try it out--a three minute song. It's justsome thing new.

MOORE: I was listening to Monkeesrecords, actually. And these guys get this coolsound, great songs, perform it fine. And it's justthis cute little pop song. That's all that thingwas, so I brought it in. The band liked it, so welearned it, and that was a pop song we did, asopposed to Krishna bringing in "A court JesterNamed Sa Sa," which was a more intense industrialpiece. It's just a different thing we decided topull on, that we got inspired from, that we wrote.And it just happens to be that the song isprobably the least offensive-sounding, sotherefore the record company figured it would bethe least difficult thing to market as a single.It's not like, gee, guys, gotta write a single.Gotta write a pop tune. If we were to have goneinto the studio in July and said, "Let's crank outa hit single," we probably wouldn't have come upwith something like "Ratlesnake", because it'sreally not what's going on the airwaves right now.We would have gone and made something moresub-poppy, or something with a hip-hop beat andswirly things around it, and that would've been asell-out.

RAGANO: For those who haven't heard"Rattlesnake" and don't know what we sound like,"Rattlesnake" is a pop song for us. Relatively,it's a pop song, because when I play it for myfriends at work, they still go, "Man, that's someweird shit." Anything we do sounds weird in thesuburbs.

BIEGERT: After working together for solong, it's really hard to step out and figure outhow this really sounds. It gets harder and harderto be objective about it. Is this pop or is itnot? I don't know. I like the song; it's cool.Let's play it. If people like it, that's fine.

15 MINUTES:Would you classifyyourselves as alternative?

MOORE: Yeah, in the true sense of theword, because what we're doing is not part of anygenre. Unfortunately, the word "alternative" hastaken on the characteristics of the term "newwave," which was such a blanket term which wasapplied to a wide range of music but which skimmeddown to anyone who wore white shirts and skinnyties. Alternative has become a catch word whichmeans either R.E.M. or the Manchester thing. Whenyou say alternative, it conjures up a relativelyslim categorization. There are so many bands whichare called alternative just because they'realternate to the mainstream, but they are themainstream after a while, and you can categorizethem. Sub pop is a category. We defycategorization.

BIEGERT: To me, alternative meanslistening to some kind of aboriginal shoe-weavingmusic or something phenomenal and totallydifferent like Javanese gamalon music. Oh, butwell, that's World Music.

15 MINUTES:Yeah, but World Music isalso a marketing term.

BIEGERT: The marketing and the music isjust totally blurred after a while, so you've gota lot of terms and a lot of people saying," "Imust like this because it's alternative."

LANCTOT: It's like, where, 10 years,would you put hummos in a food store? It's not,like, in the diary section or in the vegetablesection. Where are you going to put it?

15 MINUTES:With the cheese, isn'tit?

LANCTOT:I think it's like that--we'realternative, but they always box us in with thecheese --and most of our fine brothers and sistersare cheese. But its' our quest to stay in thehummos section