Getting his start as a self-proclaimed “guitarwhore” for Front Line Assembly and “drugwhore” for Ministry, Jeff Stoddard “came into the game through punk rock, but needed more.”
More soon came his way when he began frequenting Skinny Puppy’s Vancouver recording studio, Subconscious, in the mid-1990s. “I learned more programming and engineering tricks in the time that I was there than I had in all of my years combined,” Stoddard said. “I saw 20 people on one side of the glass playing music and one on the other. It looked like there were more jobs on the other side.”
Stoddard rambled through Europe for a few years and finally landed in Taiwan to surf and remix singles for Sony BMG in 2001. Stoddard said: “Taiwan was great because the equipment here was world-class but very cheap.” But by 2003 Stoddard had gone from “golden boy to butt boy” and was disgusted when a higher-up told him it wasn’t the music that mattered, it was only the packaging of the product.
By this time, Stoddard had enough experience under his studded belt to believe he could make it on his own as a producer and focus on his one-time side project RoughHausen, which had released Defenestrated, a “hardcore dusty rock techno” record.
Since then RoughHausen has come out with three more full albums and a few singles and remixes, making Stoddard an in-demand producer and mixer in heavy industrial grindcore circles in the US and Europe. “MySpace has been a huge source of income for me,” Stoddard said.
But it’s not just foreign artists that Stoddard works with. At the present he’s mixing and co-producing Go Chic’s first full-length album, with an eye for a release by the end of the year. “Jeff contacted me one day and asked me to feature on a song on the RoughHausen EP [Someone’s Gotta Pay],” said lead singer Ariel Zheng (鄭思齊). “I got to work with him and really appreciate what he does. I showed the demo of our work together to the other girls in Go Chic, as at that time we were desperately looking for someone sharp enough to mix our album. Not many people are doing the kind of music we are doing, and Jeff really gets us. You just don’t get that kind of talent around here.”
Performing live, which RoughHausen, along with Go Chic, BB Bomb (BB彈) and DJ Spykee Fat will be doing tomorrow night at VU Live House (地下絲絨), has not always translated well for Taiwanese audiences.
“The first show we ever had, it was amazing how quiet 600 people could be,” Stoddard said. “And at the end of the show, I threw up the devil’s horns and people mistook it for giving them the finger. I got hate e-mails for six months after that. And someone called the Art Police wrote on their Web site that I should be put in jail for crimes against art. I wear that as a badge of honor now.”
RoughHausen shows since then have been known for sonic experimentation and fans going berserk. At this weekend’s show, Stoddard predicts, “If you take yourself seriously, I’m going to spank you. If you know how to party, I’m going to spank you even harder.”
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