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Pop Culture
Oct 17, 2011, 07:17AM

Brushstrokes and Lacerations

A 1993 Archives of American Art interview with late actor/arts patron Vincent Price vs. a 2011 Mess + Noise interview with amplified glass musician Lucas Abela.

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Vincent Price: These were all people who were sort of wandering around with no focus.

Lucas Abela: I had this graveyard shift where I’d started chopping records up and building my own modified decks.

Price: People just didn’t know.

Abela: Not that I can remember.

Price: It was the beginning of the war.

Abela: But that was before the glass.

Price: Everything was volunteer.

Abela: One night I looked at my face in the mirror somewhere in Austria and there were all these nicks and cuts on my face and I thought the same thing to myself: what the fuck do you do?

Price: This was the theater.

Abela: It’s a ghetto, it’s a very deep ghetto. It’s also a drug, I’m high afterwards.

Price: I really am violently American.

Abela: I’m somewhere else.

Price: Nobody knew where anything was.

Abela: The body was a wreck so I couldn’t drive it without attracting too much attention from the police.

Price: And the candy. Screen test, oh, yes. I came out and did a screen test for Gone With the Wind. And didn’t get the part unfortunately.

Abela: I never recorded, never rehearsed. So I saved up some dole cheques, maybe got a dole advance cheque, and got the Kombi CD pressed up and sent it around the world.

Price: And I was perfectly willing to be used as such. But it was fun.

Abela: One of the early turntable experiments I did, once I’d gotten rid of the decks, was attaching them to high power motors and having skewers and knives as styluses, more like a scrape percussion kind of thing.

Price: There were something like eleven Brancusis, you know, with their mounts and everything, which took up a lot of space. I can’t talk anymore.

Abela: Or sometimes I can feel it dribbling down my body.

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