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April 24-30, 2003 music Period Peace
Adult. Is. All. Grown. Up. And. Happy. Adult.’s music is affective. Listeners end up uneasy, unsettled and maybe even a little damp. The sound is a shoddy dose of electronic post-punk that scars with vigorous electronic beats, razor-sharp synthesizers, hooky melodies, raw four-note basslines and sneering vocals. A bold, snappy snare -- heartless, soulless and mechanical -- holds down the groove. It’s a trend-setting hybrid of techno, electro, punk, ’80s synth-pop and industrial, with influences ranging from The Clash to techno to Human League. "We try to take all of these elements and bring them together to hopefully create something new and interesting," contends Nicola Kuperus, the Detroit duo's fearless singer and keyboard player whose voice also whined and groaned throughout Swayzak's "I Dance Alone" and Death In Vegas' "Hands Around My Throat." For Adam Lee Miller -- Adult.'s beat maker, computer programmer and bass player -- machine-made music became a necessity at an early age. "I was in punk bands in the mid-'80s. I tried to incorporate keyboards and got kicked out of the band for it," he remembers. "Drum machines and synthesizers allow you to be one person in college [while] continuing to write music. I also have an inherent love for synthetic sound." Kuperus and Miller have been married for almost five years and live in Detroit -- both armed with degrees in fine arts. "We do everything together except go to the bathroom," she laughs. "That's private time." The couple continues to focus on synthetic, pulsating sounds with their 7-year-old Ersatz Audio label -- through which they've already released six records and two full-length CDs under the name Adult. Miller's solo project, Artificial Material, became an enormous success in the synth-pop/electroclash scene following a promotional tour of Germany for a Studio K7 release titled Electrecord 2000. Kuperus and Miller opted to tour together with her singing over some of his material. Right after, the couple decided to work together full-time and released their Modern Romantics 12-inch (Electrecord) under the name Plasma Co. -- a dopey, Kraftwerkian, Model 500-ish grind with "new electro" pulsations. Immediately after, they changed the band to Adult. -- a name that mordantly reflects their own personal growth. "There was a minimalist painter in the '60s named Frank Stella," recalls Miller. "When I asked him about his paintings he said, ŒWhat you see is what you get.' The period after the name ŒAdult.' reflects that statement. We're not trying to be anybody else. "When we write our music we don't think of ourselves as a young, hip band," he asserts. "ŒMature' is kind of a loaded word. But we don't think of ourselves as fun party music. I don't see us playing in someone's backyard for a barbeque-type thing. We're really trying to make interesting music, and we have a lot of passion in it." In the beginning, the duo found themselves getting booked at "horrible raves." "I don't really want to play for a bunch of 16-year-olds who have pacifiers and glowsticks and are on E giving each other backrubs in the middle of the dancefloor," contends Kuperus. "That's not who I am making music for. So we thought, ŒLet's just call ourselves Adult. because that's serious.'" Adult.'s first full-length, Resuscitation (2001), is loaded with songs that use absurdly complicated sequences that could never be played by a human. But on the aptly titled new album Anxiety Always, the tireless pair had a live show in mind when creating it. This time there's live bass and more vocals. The songs can more easily be reproduced in a live setting and with more humanness to it. It's all about energy. "We want to be able to give the audience a lot of energy, and hope in return to get a lot of energy back," says Miller. "At the end of our last show, we were absolutely 100-percent, soaking-wet exhausted. And that's what we wanted. People ran on stage and took their clothes off because they were so excited." And lyrically, their disturbing words are full of humor, sarcasm and irresistible tastelessness. It's countercurrent to the poppy, uppity music: "When I touch your skin/ I feel I have to wash my hands/ Just when I think I'm in control/ I fall apart again." "The lyrics are almost like a collage," asserts Miller. "We'll take a line from a book, we'll write a line, then take a line from a Martha Stewart magazine, then we'll get a line from an e-mail somebody sends or a conversation. Then we start putting them together and see what kind of imagery unfolds. It's never like a didactic political message." "Sometimes we'll write a few songs that are like, ŒYeah, this song's really gonna make the normal people hate us,'" Kuperus adds with a snickering laugh. And can their sound ever reach a commercial level? Well, not if they can help it. "There's another version of the song ŒGlue Your Eyelids Together' that we didn't release," Miller reveals. "It was much prettier and singsongy, and we purposely went in and detuned the synths and distorted the bass and made a chorus that was not pleasant. We purposely did things like that to make sure it wasn't too happy-poppy." Adult. plays Making Time with Dave P, Mike Z, Chris P, Justine D, Rory Phillips, Gregg Foreman and DJ Diabolic, Fri., April 25, 10 p.m.-3:30 a.m., $8, Transit, Sixth and Spring Garden sts., 215-925-8878. 
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