-
Demystified: Tom Fec & Black Moth Super Rainbow
Because he’s taken great care to submerge his identity over the years — refusing to show his face in photos, burying his voice in a hazy electronic fog — fans once wondered if musician Tom Fec really existed. But Fec is real, and on a clear, cool fall night in early October, he’s cruising around a nuclear power plant, a jackknife smile on his face.
Fec is 32 years old, tall but not towering, with a neatly kept beard and nondescript glasses, and for the last few hours, he’s been giving me a tour of the weirder nooks and valleys outside his home city of Pittsburgh. It’s an area that can be biblically lovely during the day, when the sky debates between purple and blue, and the sun flares off the street windows like a gold-struck match. But after dusk, the region turns midnight-movie eerie, and the landscape becomes seemingly overrun with half-emptied town squares, harshly lit industrial sanctuaries, and even a few presumably haunted houses.
Our last stop on the tour is the power plant, the home of one of Fec’s favorite local-oddity landmarks. “There’s a kids’ park right near the reactors,” Fec says, slowing his Jeep Wrangler. “It’s insane. You’re on the swing set, and there’s a giant stack puffing a few hundred feet away.”
Fec specializes in jarring juxtaposition, and he’d recently visited the site to shoot some video for his live show. Yet as we drove around the perimeter of the plant, the park was nowhere to be found. Maybe it had been gobbled up in the plant’s smoldering mechanical maw, or maybe Fec was simply lost. Either way, after a few minutes of baffled ambling, he gave up and drove away.
Fec can lose his way easily, even around Pittsburgh, where he’s lived and worked his entire life, and where he’s slowly, quietly built a one-man musical empire. Since the mid-90s, Fec has recorded more than a dozen albums and EPs of beautifully disfigured pop music, which he releases either under his solo pseudonym, Tobacco, or as the leader of the quasi-secretive collective called Black Moth Super Rainbow. Fec’s songs are peppy little nightmares, often built out of nothing more than a few woozy synthesizer lines, some menacingly fat-free drumbeats, and vaporous natural-word lyrics. And he cloaks his vocals in a vocoder, making his words deep and grody; he sounds a bit like Stripe from Gremlins, albeit with a touch of laryngitis and a penchant for metaphysical imagery. It’s a batshit mish-mash, but it’s also deeply, inexplicably catchy.
“When I started playing, I wanted to make what I wasn’t hearing,” says Fec. “I wanted to entertain myself.”
In recent years, though, Fec’s fanbase has grown to include Beck, the Flaming Lips, and Minutemen co-founder Mike Watt. His most recent album, Black Moth Super Rainbow’s Cobra Juicy, is his best yet, and certainly his most direct. Its first single, “Windshield Smasher,” is a power-chord smorgasbord that’s equal parts Gary Glitter and Gary Numan.
There’s an eerie, weekend-Warriors video for “Windshield,” but you won’t see Fec in it — nor will you see him in the band’s press photos, or possibly even on stage. For most of his career, Fec has tried to hide not only his voice, but also his image. When Black Moth Super Rainbow first broke out in 2007, Fec and the other group members obscured themselves behind masks or stage equipment, and they rarely gave in-depth interviews. Press releases described them as a colony of neo-hippies living in the Pennsylvania woods, where they answered to eco-folksy monikers like Father Hummingbird, shared stories of witches, and recorded batch after batch of day-glo sing-alongs.
As a result, BMSR has developed a strange but sizable fanbase, particularly online, where listeners parse Fec’s every statement, digging for clues. The whole lost-in-the-woods thing was complete nonsense, of course — just a way for Fec to amuse himself, and for the group to wring out some extra publicity.
But the secrecy surrounding Black Moth allowed Fec to create something that, in the digital-overshare era, is more rare than a Top 10 single, and possibly even more valuable: a genuine sense of mystique, one that’s endured longer than anyone could have expected, and that Fec’s played up to ridiculous heights (last year, when Fec appeared on the Fox News talk show Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld — which is a weird enough TV booking as it is—he insisted on being filmed in a bathroom stall, from the ankles down). Even some of the people who know Fec don’t really know him. When I told Bo Mirosseni, the director of the “Windshield Smasher” clip, that I was visiting Fec in Pittsburgh, he sounded surprised, and even a little envious. “I picture you in a cabin with a bunch of fog machines, asking questions,” joked Mirosseni, who never actually met Fec in person. “But you never see Tom. He’s just lost in the fog.”
Fec’s identity is no longer some big secret. He’s easily Googleable, and he long ago stopped donning a mask onstage (though he still wears one in photos, in part because photo shoots bore him). But pointing that out simply ruins the fun. At this point, Black Moth Super Rainbow has transcended being merely a band, and become a sort of happy ruse — an open-secret long-con that its fans would love keep going forever. They want to believe in the myth, even if Fec himself hasn’t always wanted to play along.
Fec’s admirers are often surprised when they meet him, and maybe a little disappointed, as he doesn’t really look the way he sounds. He’s not some hulking, gravelly voiced nutball, nor is he some meerkat-mannered, socially inept shut-in. “I expected this weird, pasty skinny guy,” says fan and friend Eric Wareheim, one-half of the nouveau-weirdo comedy team Tim & Eric. “And he’s kind of like this chiseled man. I hugged him, and he was made out of steel.” Adds Watt, who’s known Fec since 2007, “He reminds me of some of the cats I met in the scene in the old days, believe it or not — someone really into music as a sincere form of expression.”
I’d first met Fec a few hours before our power-plant drive-by, when he’d picked me up in front of my hotel. He’d just come from a run and was dressed in a lightweight black jacket over a black v-neck, dark jeans, a blue baseball cap, and slightly dulled orange sneakers. I was wearing pretty much the same thing, though my sneakers were green. Together, we look like two slightly bro-ish grad students.
After a quick bite to eat, Fec and I head to a nearby Target store; a new series of Garbage Pail Kids had just come out, and Fec is eager to pick up a few packs. “These are awesome,” he says afterward, investigating his haul. “I mean, they’re not awesome. But they’re awesome.”
Fec grew up in Hampton, a nearby suburb. As a kid, he fell hard for gross-out comedy like Garbage Pail Kids and the Toxic Avenger films, the kind of pop-crud that favored ooze over gore. One of his favorite possessions was a small, cheap, orange rubber ball with a skeletal face, which his mother bought for him during a vacation to the Jersey shore; decades later, Fec would use the toy as the inspiration for Cobra Juicy’s ghoulish cover. His parents, who still live nearby — Fec’s father builds countertops, and his mother works at a non-profit and does “nanny stuff” — indulged their son’s gnarlier whims, allowing Fec to mount a giant inflatable Freddy Krueger on their porch and to send his grandmother through a haunted house he’d built out of garbage bags.
For a kid who was happily culture-addicted, Fec didn’t listen to the radio. He disliked the Who and Beatles records his dad played, and couldn’t stand the Top 40 music preferred by his mother. “I hated music at first,” he says. “I just thought it was the dumbest form of expression.”
One day, when Fec was in junior high, a friend brought a guitar to his house and started playing a few Green Day riffs. “I was like, ‘Wow, that’s actually kinda cool. I might wanna learn that.’ ” Several members of Fec’s family were musicians, and he convinced a cousin to teach him guitar. Eventually, the two formed a duo, recording a series of abrasively atmospheric songs using a four-track machine. It would be Fec’s first and last full-on musical collaboration.
After high school, Fec attended Art Institute of Pittsburgh for film and video, commuting from home. He kept recording and practicing, teaching himself how to play old synths he bought off eBay, and eventually discovering a vocoder. “You can only do so much when you have a shitty voice,” he says. “At least with the vocoder, I can pull a strong texture and a strong melody. It’s not just hanging out there, whimpering.”
In 2003, following years of experimentation, Fec released his first proper album, Falling Through a Field. Though credited to Black Moth Super Rainbow, Fec wrote and recorded all the parts himself, and the album wound up on the radar of Ryan Manon, a musician and indie-label owner who’d eventually join the group itself. “Tom and I spent years having weekly conversations about how to grow as musicians, and as brands,” Manon says. “I was a bird in Tom’s ear, chirping constantly about branding.”
By the time of 2007’s Dandelion Gum, Fec had assembled a live band and hashed out a blatantly dubious origin myth. According to one press release, Dandelion Gum was “a product of the woods,” one supposedly inspired by cabin-swapped tales featuring a family of witches. “I thought it would be cool to cultivate bullshit, basically,” Fec says now. “I just wanted a world for this stuff to exist in.”
Whatever Fec’s intent, the fantastical tales, coupled with the group’s inscrutable stage appearance, became the lotus of an accidental marketing campaign. Dandelion Gum had arrived during the start of the MP3-blog era, when gangs of charismatically negligible (and mostly interchangeable) sour-puss indie-rockers were jamming writers’ inboxes with streaming come-ons, hoping for even a passing mention. Gum probably would have broken through even without all the B.S. — the reviews were largely positive — but the tall tales made for good copy, and gave fans a wiki-ready diversion that would keep them curious and active, years later. “The stories are still brought up to this day,” says Manon. “No matter how stupid they were, they worked.”
Fec lives in a cozy, tree-tucked house in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. When I stop by for a visit, there’s a laser printer humming in the corner, a TV playing the late-‘90s horror flick Wishmaster, and empty cardboard boxes slumped and stacked on the patio like dead leaves. Fec’s wife Maux — who performs in BMSR under the name Seven Fields of Aphelion — is sitting with a few friends, busily assembling packages and plastering stickers onto vinyl. It’s a scene of tidy, polite chaos.
Fec leads me to the basement, where, next to his treadmill, there are boxes of CDs and vinyl, and bins overflowing with manically grinning, orange-colored BMSR latex masks that, when finished, will allow the wearer to listen to Cobra Juicy via a USB. For the last few weeks, Fec and his aides have been working 12- to 14-hour shifts, trying to get this stuff ready in time for Cobra Juicy’s official release date. Fec only tours for short periods, so he makes most of his money on merchandise, meaning he’s constantly filling orders. This is the life of a successful indie-rocker in the post-piracy era: You make enough money to quit your day job, only to replace it with a new job that requires you to work long into the night.
Fec and I head to the second floor of his house, where an already tiny room is cramped further with DVDs and audio equipment, not to mention several more masks. Fec has recorded all of his recent work in this room, doing so mostly in solitude (though Beck makes an appearance on the 2010 Tobacco album Maniac Meat, he contributed his vocals via email). But none of Fec’s earlier work prepared him for the difficulty of Cobra Juicy, an album that almost never got made at all.
By 2009, the situation within Black Moth Super Rainbow had gotten tense. Fec says some of the members were vying for more creative input, leading to nasty arguments (one member was eventually fired, he said, while another quit). The stress from the infighting wore at him, but more pressing were his worries about BMSR’s music. He feared that the hazy sounds he was creating, which were originally intended for his own private amusement, were now being subjected to too many outside opinions and expectations. He considered dissolving BMSR for good. “I felt like everyone had built me into a box,” he says. “And that box was getting smaller.”
He stopped sleeping regularly, and in early 2010, he began developing hypochondria. “I was at South by Southwest,” Fec says, “and on my last day there, I went to the ER, because I thought I had ball cancer. I was fucking crazy. I think I was trying to find something wrong, so someone could help me out.”
That summer, while Fec was in the midst of his breakdown, he received a strange business proposition. A multi-platinum record executive, whom Fec describes as a “very big player,” asked him if we could write some material for an up-and-coming female singer (Fec won’t reveal her name). Fec didn’t want to be making music anymore, but it was a potentially lucrative gig, so he spent three months churning out songs. When the singer rejected his ideas, Fec left the project, took the material with him, and used it to make his own album — which he himself then scrapped, thinking it sounded too much like his old material.
By the time he had a version of Cobra Juicy that he liked, Fec was feeling good about music again, even his own. He knew the record was his most accessible — he’d set out to make a “cocky pop” album — and had his lawyer meet with nearly every major indie label, looking for a deal. But he was told they wanted brand-new acts, the kind of artists they could sell as breakthrough bands. They wanted a marketing hook — the very kind Fec had made his name with just a few years earlier. “Everyone turned me down,” says Fec. “They told me I was unsignable, and I believed it.”
As a last resort, Fec turned to Kickstarter. Cobra Juicy had cost him nothing to record, but he wanted to make sure there was an audience for all the elaborate merch he’d devised. He asked for $45,000, not thinking he’d get anywhere near. But his fans rallied on message boards on social media, helping Fec earn more than $125,000, and making Cobra Juicy one of the successful music-related projects in Kickstarter’s history. Fec says the total cost for the album — including merchandise — came to about $115,000; once you subtract the Kickstarter fee, and account for fans who bailed on payment, Fec ended up about $3,000 in the hole, though he’s not complaining.
Thanks in part to the crowd-sourced defibrillation, Fec is once again thinking about making music. But at the moment, his instruments are pushed to the side of his recording studio, replaced by crates of smiling oranges-heads. “I’ve had the bug,” he says. “But I’m running my own label. I’m either painting masks or drawing sketches or packing boxes. And that’s not gonna end for days.”
Before Fec returns to work at his ad hoc home warehouse, he drives me back to my hotel. As we cruise through Pittsburgh, college students spill out onto the sidewalk, galloping half-drunk beneath the city’s jarring mixed-use skyline. When Fec began touring the country years ago, he figured he’d find another city to live in. But he loves it here. His family’s nearby, and he can make a decent living.
Still, Fec’s never felt like part of the music community in Pittsburgh. When he started playing live, no one in the city would book him, and to this day, he only performs here sporadically. Fec is a sneaky genius with a small army of obsessive fans, and the main protagonist in a seemingly never-ending fabulist narrative. But in his hometown, he’s another dude with a Jeep and a job. “Sometimes it’s weird, being just an internet presence,” he tells me before dropping me off for the night. “Here, I’m just another asshole.”
He laughs, but I can’t tell whether he’s bemused by all of this, or irritated, or both. After all of our time together, Tom Fec had finally slipped behind a mask.
1778 notes
-
jmbr likes this
-
awakeinme reblogged this from pyramidmirrors
-
traffichaze likes this
-
tar-ok likes this
-
auditoryhallucination reblogged this from pyramidmirrors
-
auditoryhallucination likes this
-
pyramidmirrors reblogged this from madvillaina
-
anaramen likes this
-
madvillaina reblogged this from storyboard
-
drawmecats likes this
-
shoppingbagsuk likes this
-
microaerophilic likes this
-
artlover05 likes this
-
nyahbissoli reblogged this from umskatista-apaixonado
-
caljac likes this
-
amygbiv likes this
-
gifts-for--men likes this
-
telecharger--films likes this
-
socialmedia-marketing-services likes this
-
gunstiger-kredit likes this
-
paid-for-post likes this
-
hosting-venezuela likes this
-
video--production likes this
-
scaredysprite likes this
-
farawaythinker likes this
-
ibeseechthee likes this
-
volvolkswagen likes this
-
horse-lover-clothing likes this
-
classified--ads likes this
-
boli83 reblogged this from storyboard
-
boli83 likes this
-
orlando-carpet-cleaning likes this
-
http-aree-nsw-com likes this
-
local-london-electricians likes this
-
magi-farah-2013 likes this
-
rustic-wooden-log-furniture-uk likes this
-
fuzzysundae likes this
-
nieshamagda42 likes this
-
youtubeih6uytvefmw likes this
-
paid-deep-link-directory likes this
-
radionics-box likes this
-
mind--machine likes this
-
ikea-handyman likes this
-
get-rid-of-manboobs likes this
-
tarjeta-de-credito-virtual likes this
-
ikea--assembly likes this
-
curso-unas-de-gel likes this
-
ruby--on-rails likes this
-
rubyon-rails likes this
-
karta--pojazdu likes this
- Show more notes
View post 1,778 notes -
Most Popular
We
