Reissued in an expanded edition by Sub Pop Records to mark the 30th anniversary of its original release, Severe Exposure is the second album from Providence, Rhode Island group Six Finger Satellite. Having purveyed riff based rock for the early part of their existence before incorporating electronic interludes (on 1993 debut album The Pigeon Is The Most Popular Bird) and experimenting with an all-synthesizer configuration on 1994’s Machine Cuisine 10", the 1995 album saw the band attempting to unify these approaches, the result being “one of the most devastating albums of 1995, if not the entire decade” according to Erick Bradshaw, who reviewed the reissue in The Wire 500.

Severe Exposure is at times reminiscent of futurist punks such as Chrome, Tubeway Army and Devo, but the paranoid, claustrophobic future world it portrays has its own uniquely dank, disturbing flavour. It exudes an atmosphere comparable to that of Detroit’s Dopplereffekt – the Detroit outfit similarly concerned with surveillance, technology and totalitarianism. Meanwhile the band’s formidable chemistry – having survived an intensely challenging period during which guitarist Peter Phillips left, bassist Kurt Niemand died and guitarist/synthesist John MacLean entered rehab – is on full display, not least between the rhythm section of freshly recruited bassist James Apt and drummer Rick Pelletier.

How would you describe the physical appearance and atmosphere of Six Finger Satellite’s self-built studio The Parlour, where Severe Exposure was recorded?

It was in an industrial space just outside of Providence. A big empty room in that building. There had been some practice rooms in the basement, which were more of a hallway with everybody playing at once, and we said to our landlord, ‘Hey, you have another space that’s a little bigger?’ He had a space upstairs, and we moved upstairs, and we’re like, ‘Can we build some walls in here and do some stuff?’ He said, ‘You can do whatever the fuck you want.’ [Laughs] It was like $200 a month, ridiculously cheap. So we just built some walls. We were like, ‘All right, that’s going to be the control room. We’re going to put a wall up over here, and then we’re going to build this room for the drums to record in.’ We had this idea that we wanted to have really dead sounding drums, so we built a little drum room.

We insulated the hell out of the walls, and we needed something to cover them. We went to this local place and found this huge roll of Santa Claus suit material, and covered the whole inside of the room in it. It’s in the video for “Parlour Games”. We were like, ‘You walk in there and you can hear your heart beating.’ Everything was super dead. We had a live room. We had a control room. We talked to Steve Albini and Bob Weston to get some ideas, but a lot of it was trial and error. We bought a soundboard, and then the studio went through various phases. We got a second board for [1996 follow-up] Paranormalized and then we redid the whole control room and made it bigger, a little bit more conducive to sound. We had a half-inch eight-track. And then we had a two-inch machine for Law Of Ruins. So the space evolved, but it was pretty much just a basic industrial space that we were able to do our thing in without a lot of muss and fuss from the landlord.

What were the sessions like?

We practiced twice a week, probably four or five hours at a clip. We worked on those songs quite a bit. The songwriting was a little different – a little bit more economical, a little bit more concise. The songs are definitely more based on sounds than a classic songwriting approach like our previous albums. John definitely was a creative driving force in that time. We spent a lot of time getting the right equipment, if I recall correctly, from a guitar standpoint. I think he went through a couple of different setups. He ended up using these Earth PA cabinets, which had horns in them. Which really worked well with the aluminium necked guitar, and this really kind of crispy high-end. He didn’t use any effects pedals. That’s all just guitar through amp.

Most of the sizzle that you hear from the record is probably the improper equipment we had to record it. So the board that we ended up using was this live soundboard. It was cheap. I don’t even know where we got it. And we discovered in the mixdown phase, we had to route the playback through the channels. So there wasn’t the ability to playback on the channels. In order to get proper levels, we had to use the mic pre’s. So basically, we were overdriving the return signal to mix, which gives it that sizzle.

Then we did a couple of different types of set ups for drums. We had a dead drum sound and a live drum sound. So the difference is, like, you know, “Simian Fever” has the live room drum sound. The drums are definitely a little bit more in the distance. You can hear more of the room. Then you have songs like “Parlor Games” where the drums are, like, really crispy and kind of right in your face.

We recorded that album in probably, like, December 1994, January 1995 and it came out in August 1995. Even coming out of The Pigeon Is The Most Popular Bird with all that internal strife, we didn’t really miss a beat in terms of our output. From 1994–98, you know, three albums, singles, tons of touring. We packed a lot of stuff into four years.

You used the Moog Liberation (one of the first commercially produced keytar synthesizers, often associated with Devo, although their usage was restricted to videos and photo sessions) which seems almost symbolic of what you were doing at the time. Can you tell me a little bit about working with that instrument?

We would go to New York, and there was a couple of shops there that sold Moogs and stuff, and I think we found the first one there. I think it was like $400. I was like, ‘Let’s get it.’ So we bought it with Sub Pop money, with our advances [laughs]. I think I still have the receipts. I think initially it was for the visual effect. It was a little hard to use. We had a guy who did repairs for us, and we brought it to him to kind of tune it up, and he’s like, ‘Oh, boy. You got one of these?’ We’re like, ‘What’s up?’ He’s like, ‘Oh, you’ll find out.’ So there’s a reason it was cheap. [Laughs] It would get hot, and it would just fly out of tune. It would just sound terrible. But visually, it was definitely a crowd stopper at the time. You’d whip out this, like, white Liberation, and people would just be like, ‘Edgar Winter!’ The very first time I played it live, we went to CBGB’s for a show with Boss Hogg, and there was a band from Detroit. I don’t remember what they were called. And I had it hidden on the side. I remember taking it out, and you could hear a gasp in the place. Then we took it on the road in the summer, and it was just really wildly unpredictable. We ended up getting a couple more for parts. We ended up using them more in the studio, on a stand. On a stand, it was great. It had great sounds. It’s polyphonic, so you could get some good stuff out of it, but live, we retired it because it was just not functional. So I just went to the Rogue and I’d play my parts on a stand. But yeah, it was definitely iconic at the time.

Were there any other notable bits of equipment around that time that helped shaped your sound?

The Rogue was the main one. I mean, we used it a lot. John played it. He had a Prophet as well that we bought at a fire sale from some shop out west. It had been in a fire, it was burned and all kind of beat up, and he used a lot of the factory settings on it. He didn’t really do a lot of programming. He ran a lot of his stuff through one of the Russian Big Muffs. But the Rogue was a big one. I would say that’s the primary one. We used it a lot in home recordings as well. We did a lot of home recording. On Paranormalized we got a Roland guitar synth that John plays on that record. So some of the stuff that sounds like synthesizers is actually a Roland guitar synth.

But it was always about the beat. It was always about the rhythm. The rhythm section continued to get better and better as the records progressed. And I think live we became a very different band. We were very unified, very focused. Our live shows became, I thought, really powerful.

Severe Exposure is like a window onto a self-contained world, a dirty, paranoid sci-fi dystopia. Was this something you were aiming for?

It’s funny you say that because I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. Some of it was from what I was reading. It was always, like, you know, kind of on the sci-fi tip, like Philip K Dick and KW Jeter, and always having a healthy scepticism about authority and our world. I think we were maybe actively trying to separate ourselves a little bit from the indie rock world at the time. I mean, it would have sounded funny if I was, like, singing about, like, sweaters. [Laughs]

It’s a very unsettling, disturbing album. Did you get much feedback along those lines?

Yeah. I think some of it comes from the sounds. There’s a tone to it, kind of a mocking cruelty, I guess. But it doesn’t take itself too seriously. At the same time, there is also a lot of self-referential stuff. We were a little bit of a closed ecosystem in a lot of ways. Not to get all kind of analytical but I have children and I’ve grown up and seen different things, I have different perspectives, like, there was a lot of trauma in our group from a personal standpoint. And I think that manifests in a certain sense. You know, you’re kind of a product of your environment and you’re a product of your upbringing to a degree. There have been times where I was like, ‘All right, where was I coming from here?’ Some of it was intentional and some of it, I think, was just subconscious. It’s funny, ‘cause I listen to it now and I’m like, ‘This record doesn’t really sound like it’s aged at all.’ And some of the themes of it are applicable to our current world. If we got criticism we would be like, ‘We’re just a mirror, man. We’re holding up a mirror. Don’t like what you see? Too bad!’ [Laughs] I think we were maybe a little bit intimidating. We didn’t really give in to it. You know, we would just meet it with, like, ‘Well, whatever. Whatever you think. Whatever you want to think.’ We were comfortable with the discomfort.

How supportive was Sub Pop once you’d delivered the album?

They were always supportive. We made that video [for “Parlour Games”] for it too. When we got the advance for that album, we spent half of it on our rents and half of it on gear. But we delivered them the record and then we’re like, ‘Hey, we want to make a video. What do you think?’ ‘We don’t really have any budget, but we can give you 5000 bucks.’ So we took that, we had a friend who put that video together and then it was like, we submitted it to them and they’re like, we’ll submit it to MTV. Don’t get your hopes up. It’s pretty low budget. I’m not sure what they’re going to do. So they submitted it and then they were like, ‘Son of a bitch, MTV picked it up.’ Then it was, ‘It’s going to be on 120 Minutes.’ Then, ‘It’s going to be on a compilation.’ I think they were pleasantly surprised. The label was always very supportive. I just don’t know if they really knew what to do with us.

Severe Exposure: Deluxe Edition is released by Sub Pop. Erick Bradshaw's review of the album appears in The Wire 500. Pick up a copy of the magazine in the online shop. Subscribers can also read the review in the online library.