Articles Garbage Experiment With New Sounds
For Next Album
From Addicted To Noise

By Gil Kaufman

Addicted To Noise Senior Writer Gil Kaufman reports: You'd never guess by chatting with them that the members of Garbage are feeling the intense pressure to beat the sophomore jinx with their in-progress second album. In fact, talking to guitarist Steve Marker, phoning from 3/4 of the member's hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, it sounds like Garbage are pleasantly re-living the laid back vibe of the first album's sessions. That album has sold over a million copies in the U. S.

"We're just sitting around trying to write some songs," said Marker, adding that despite what some would like to believe, "things are going great."

How great?
"Nobody's banging their head against the wall just yet," he offered.

The group took a working holiday at a Seattle cabin a few months back during which they locked themselves into a room and took what Marker described as a "very lo-fi recording set-up" which they used to record new song ideas directly into a computer. "We basically just sat around in a room having a beer and one person would play something, and the others would join in or not," said Marker of the band's less-than-intense working method.

As for what those sessions yielded, Marker could only describe the results as "25 things that could be songs, or could be crap, it's hard to say."

The quartet met up again in Madison recently after a post Grammy's break and have spent every day listening to the 25-plus fragments and gotten back to their rigorous schedule of "sitting around having a beer and seeing if anyone can come up with something."

Although Marker said things are going well, he also said it's still way too early to call any of what they have "songs."

However Marker did reveal that a pleasant side-effect of many months of touring was that songs and ideas do seem to be coming to the group a lot faster, mainly because "if somebody does have an idea, we don't have to fumble around on a guitar as much looking for the right notes."

So far the sessions have yielded one song Marker described as "a total 70's disco thing," and a bunch of songs that are "way too noisy for anybody to hear."

Surprisingly, Marker said there's a stack of song fragments that feature some "scratchy stuff." He said he utilized his recently-acquired set of turntables for his "fake DJ" trip.

Marker expects the group to be in the studio "almost every day" for the whole summer, with the earliest, most optimistic date for a new album being sometime in September. "Right now we're just trying to get the arrangements down and find the key Shirley (Manson) sings them in," said Marker, praising Manson for coming up with a couple of "really good lyrics without really thinking about it" through improvisation over the boys' tracks.

The "quiet one" promised that Garbage wouldn't play any live shows until the new album is completed and they've all had a chance to "finish coming down from the last tour."