The Threshold People:  Silence, insolent Earthman!  Sorry, had to get that out, too.

Well, first, I think we do definitely see The Threshold People as arising from deathrock and the broader psychotronic culture, rather than the electronic music scene, as such.  Our musical lineage and closest kinship is with bands like The Misfits, The Brickbats, Alien Sex Fiend, and the mighty Messer Chups.  That said, I think we are moving into an area – completely electronic, sample-based music – that the retro-horror culture is perhaps only slowly waking up to.  Or, at least, I haven’t yet found much that sounds like us. 

TTP:  The words themselves are taken from Criswell’s introduction to Night of the Ghouls:  “Now I tell a tale of the threshold people, so astounding that some of you may faint.”  When we were still an unnamed project, we built the song The Threshold People in part around that sample, and then ended up taking our name from the song.  When we started considering it as a name, it began to take on a certain resonance that resulted in us asking ourselves: "Who, exactly, are the threshold people?"  The answer came out in the music.

TTP:  Well, that was really the point – to take the same cultural touchstones and invest them in another kind of music.  I’ve played in more traditional bands before, most notably deathrock outfit Kaecyy & The Deadly Nightshade Band, but my solo music has always tended towards soundscapey type stuff, and I brought that with me to The Threshold People.  To be honest, The Threshold People is the about the least abstract, most beat-heavy electronic project I’ve been involved in.

Now, on a really ambient track like Yucca Flats, we were aiming for some of the deeper currents running under the movie itself, to touch the bleakness and genuine pathos at the heart of the director’s blurry vision, which is normally obscured by the ineptitude of his technique.  The Beast of Yucca Flats is a fatally flawed and claustrophobic movie that, nonetheless, fascinates.  It feels like something you’d find in an abandoned bomb-shelter, an artifact of the director’s portentous and paranoid inner world.  We wanted the song to hint at some of that strangeness, that distant and alien quality of the film itself, as well as the story.  Incidentally, every sound in that song, aside from the synth drone, is taken directly from the movie – the song isn’t “about” the movie, it’s actually a kind of remix “of” the movie. 

TTP:  There was a very specific kind of music we wanted to listen to that we weren’t hearing anywhere else, so late one night we decided to make it ourselves. 

In the beginning, it was just something we were doing for ourselves to listen to and share with friends.  Somehow, one of the demos got around to This Plague – they took it more seriously than we did, at first, but eventually we came around and agreed to cut an album with them.  They were great, really hands-off: they just insisted that we make the album we wanted, not the album we were willing to settle for.  Learned a lot working on Night of….  Now we’re pretty much full-time here at the compound, watching movies, conducting research, smoking a lot of mugwort…

TTP:  We’re not big fans of “horror movies,” honestly.  What we love are monster movies, if you can see the distinction I’m making.  It comes back to the whole “who are the threshold people” thing.  Most of the movies we watch are not at all scary, at least not to a modern audience.  What we look for in them are the characters, the stories, and our favorite, most empathic characters are usually the monsters. 

It’s easy to laugh at the old movies, because they often haven’t dated well, and the budgets, effects, acting, and, well, the writing are often pretty low-quality – with some wonderful and surprising exceptions, like The Giant Gila Monster or I Bury the Living.  What sets real monster movie fans apart from MSTie-style “Turkey-lovers” (and don’t get me wrong, we love Mystery Science Theater), is the ability and willingness to see through all that to the raw passion and beauty underneath.  It’s like deciphering dream-imagery.  These are our myths, the often tragic histories of the threshold people, and – I know this is a tangent, but – we do our best to translate them into musical form, to give them new life in a new medium.  It’s the classic artist’s compulsion: to feel something deeply, to be affected by something, and then feel the need to involve oneself somehow, to try to recapture or restate that original feeling.  There’s nothing ironic about our appreciation.

I’m totally off-track now, and not really answering your question, sorry.  So, yeah, Evil (with a big ‘E’) really isn’t that interesting to us, so we tend not to explore it in our music.  And, honestly, it’s not even that common in the movies we watch.  Obsession, jealousy, loneliness, more-or-less righteous anger or vengeance, fear, um, hunger – those are the big motivating drives in the monster movies, along with, not infrequently, “forbidden love” (or, more likely, “frustrated desire”) between the monster and a “normal” human.  Evil doesn’t really play into it.

TTP:  Yes, definitely.  The monster surf bands and one-off spooky novelty records are a major influence, not so much on our sound but on the way we approach the horror content of our music.  A track like Graveyard Rock [ed.- Tarantula Ghoul and Her Gravediggers] or Haulin’ Hearse by The Ghastly Ones isn’t actually trying to frighten or shock the listener – they just really dig monster movies.  On the other hand, The Threshold People generally isn’t as campy or jokey in tone as a lot of the old spooky-groups: no punny song titles about Dracula or the Wolfman Watusi.  Not that we take ourselves terribly seriously, but our humor usually tend towards that kind of hyperbolic earnestness you used to hear in the old trailers and radio spots - "You Have Not Known Terror Until You've Seen The Beast With A Million Eyes!!!"

As for horror-core, I honestly haven’t listened to a lot of it.  I did hear a bit about it at the time, though, and that was definitely inspirational; more so, perhaps than the music itself – the sounds I heard in my head while reading the reviews and descriptions were very different from what horror-core actually turned out to be, but it sparked my early interest in experimenting with monster music outside the traditional niches of punk and metal.

TTP:  We get along pretty well with TRG and Sypha, and we’re fans of their music.  They’re definitely more, um, esoteric, I guess, than we usually are.  I mean, our music is pretty straightforward tribute to old monster movies, but TRG is going for something stranger.  They helped found This Plague of Dreaming, and they’re behind a lot of the R&D work here.  We haven’t spent as much time with Sypha, since he usually works out of his own lab, but the music is great, really insectile.  Aside from his work with PlagueDream, he’s involved with the Necronomicon Transhuman Society, a “mutagenic think tank.”  I’m not quite sure what that means, but it sounds about right when you hear his music.

TTP:  I’ve never actually seen the TPOD executives.  We work in darkness.  Our paychecks are thrust at us by a hairy hand sticking out of the cavern wall, and every dawn they keep the soul of the last technician to leave the studio.

But the hours are good.

TTP:  We take our samples from a lot of different movies, usually before 1970, though we don’t have a hard rule about it.  Some tracks, like Yucca Flats or Radio Zombi are single-movie songs (Beast of… and Night of the Living Dead, respectively), while others branch out more.  The Threshold People took its intro and outro from Mad Monster Party?, and referenced Night of the Ghouls, The Last Man on Earth, and, again, Beast of Yucca Flats.  Behemoth was tricky, since we couldn’t find an audio adaptation of Master and Margarita, so we built it out of pilfered lines from other movies – The Black Cat, Arsenic and Old Lace, with the general idea that the older Peter Lorre is reacting to Behemoth, while the younger Lorre is the voice of Behemoth himself.  The choral music is actually an old recording of the song May In Moscow, in Russian – the final “dawn in Moscow” verse, played backwards.  And Burroughs, of course, from the 1960’s re-edit of the Danish silent film Häxen.

A message…  I wouldn’t say there is a message, per se, but at the same time they aren’t arbitrary.  We work with samples that capture something about the story or character, that speak to us, that bring something of their original context to the song.  They’re sounds we love, really.  The clank-swish of the pendulum from Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum is, I personally feel, one of the greatest pieces of horror sound design ever – it’s really its own character, in the movie.  I knew, the first time I heard it, that we needed to build a song around it.  Lugosi’s “forsaken jungle hell” speech from Bride of the Atom has actually moved me to tears – it’s really just a very moving performance, and it gives the movie an emotional center it would’ve otherwise lacked.

TTP:  Abbott and Costello Meet The Threshold People?  Actually, we’re working on a new album right now, hopefully to be released this October.  We will return!  Keep watching the skies!