Fotocrime is the brainchild of singer/guitarist/producer Ryan Patterson, who formed the trio in 2017 after his former band Coliseum broke up after more than a decade together.
Comprised of Patterson, guitarist Nick Tinnemann and bassist Will Allard, Fotocrime specialize in a sound that has its tentacles in everything from darkcave to synthpop to stuff you’d hear on late-80s and early 90s late-night alternative radio. them.
Fotocrime will release their fourth studio album, Acceleratednext September, and since I’ve been playing with an advance copy of it for the past few weeks, I wanted to talk to Ryan about it.
We also talk about Ryan’s background in Louisville’s hardcore scene and the influences that have shaped Fotocrime’s discography.
Since your personal discography stretches back to the hardcore punk scene of the 90s, I was curious to know if you always dreamed of making music like the one you do with Fotocrime? I ask because it’s such a far cry from the work you did with Automatic and Enkindel(s), and certainly Coliseum.
It’s not necessarily dreamed up, but it’s been in my musical DNA since my youth. I was a pre-teen in the late 80’s and obsessed with The Cure, Depeche Mode and most of what was on MTV 120 minutes.
When punk and hardcore came into my life, the bands I discovered at the time made the idea of picking up a guitar and writing a song more accessible. The Cure was more guitar-based, so it sort of bridged that gap, but as much as I listened to Depeche Mode Trespasser over and over again in 7th grade, I never thought about how it was created… It looked alien.
Coliseum has been around for 12 years and we’ve changed quite a bit in that time. The transition from Coliseum’s latest album, The kiss of anxiety, to Fotocrime didn’t strike me as entirely jarring, and Coliseum fans could clearly hear the post-punk elements in our last three albums. There’s certainly a stylistic difference from the early Coliseum material, but that was 20 years ago, and I think anyone who doesn’t change and grow personally and creatively over a few decades is doing themselves a disservice.
All of my favorite artists in all fields have been versatile, they’ve taken risks and made big changes over the years of their output, and that’s always very exciting to me.
Enkindels and Automatic were bands I joined in my late teens over 25 years ago, each for relatively short periods of time. They were my first touring bands, I had a lot of fun and learned a lot, we had a lot of wild adventures touring in those pre-internet days.
I was so young and it was so long ago that no band really matters in terms of the music I make now. However, this is all part of my ongoing journey and life in music and I am grateful for the experiences and I love these people.
Was there a moment in the earliest stages of Fotocrime where something clicked and it felt like you were onto something worth continuing to pursue? Maybe it was a song?
This was probably ‘Nadia’ or ‘Autonoir’ from the first album, Pain principle. In 2016 I worked on new music for a year alone in my practice. I was trying to find my voice, both vocally and sonic-wise, and start something from scratch, which was both exciting and terrifying. “Nadia” was a song that felt propulsive with its guitar hooks and synth arpeggios, but also felt easy to sing and used my natural singing voice for maybe the first time.
Autonoir touched on a lot of things I was obsessed with musically – Suicide, Portishead, Roy Orbison, the rockabilly songs of the Misfits The legacy of brutality— and the cinematic feel of film noir that I wanted to capture with Fotocrime.
That said, in all that time no one else had heard the music or the demos, so it wasn’t until I finally tracked this album down in early 2017 with J.J. Robbins in his studio, I found it working and cohesive. Making this album was a revelation for me.
Listening to the progress of Accelerated, looks like the most realized Fotocrime material yet. The stylistic aspects that you drew influence from are still there, but the songs stand on their own. The vocal melodies are also your best yet. What kind of pressure did you put on yourself while writing the album?
Great to hear everywhere, thanks. I don’t think I felt a lot of pressure in terms of songwriting, I always push myself, but I write songs to please myself and my bandmates first and foremost. I find writing and recording music incredibly fun and rewarding, it’s exciting at every turn and I love it.
While I’m always trying to grow in all the different aspects of creating an album – as a singer, songwriter, musician, designer, and now also a producer and engineer – my specific goals with Accelerated they definitely had a vocal performance that I was proud of, but I also wrote songs that were immediate and catchy that played to the strengths of my bandmates Nick and Will.
Nick and Will are amazing musicians (as well as wonderful songwriters in their projects Fool’s Ghost and Aon Brasi) and I wanted Accelerated not to be a standalone album like previous Fotocrime albums were.
I wanted to include all three of us in everything, so I guess I felt some self-imposed pressure to achieve that. I would get the songs to a point where I could bring them in and they would lend their talents in whatever way the songs called for, which included Nick playing most of the guitar on the album and singing a lot and Will playing bass, keys and some guitar and backing vocals.
In some cases they write parts for guitar or bass, sometimes they help with arrangement and dynamics. While I’m not sure they’re even fully aware of how much of an influence they had on the record, I think it improved it immensely overall and was a more fun and less isolating experience for me. I am very grateful to them as teammates and close friends.
There are several songs Accelerated that stuck in my head. One of them will be “Match Factory Girl”. Tell me a little about this song and its lyrics.
“Match Factory Girl” is lyrically inspired by a 1990 Finnish film of that title. In the movie the main character is an extremely introverted factory worker who is humiliated and mistreated by people in her life, at the end of the movie she quietly takes revenge on all of them.
Lately I’ve been imagining class warfare more and more, so the song is a lyrical narrative in which the matchgirl of the title takes her revenge by burning down the metaphorical fortresses of the bourgeoisie. The ruling class is led to the gallows as what was once their palace becomes their prison. Their crowns melt and the gold seeps into the ground. This is capitalism’s revenge fantasy.
Musically it was great to record, straight forward four on the floor. Nick’s guitar bounces through a rhythmic three-head tape delay, Will’s bass sounds all over the place, and he gives a great backing vocal performance in the bridge. I love the brassy, fizzy filtered synth sequence at the top and the polyrhythmic conga drums that come before the final chorus. I believe this was the last song written and recorded for the album.
Now that you’ve been doing Fotocrime for a while, do you feel much more comfortable in the vocal booth? I guess it took you a while to get used to using such a different side of your voice when you first started tracking Always EPs.
In this album, I am the happiest with my vocal performance. I feel comfortable singing but my natural voice is quite low and before Fotocrime I always struggled with that range.
With Fotocrime in general and beyond Accelerated in particular, I tried to embrace this depth and look for inspiration in my characters with quiet and unmistakable voices. Mark Lanegan, Leonard Cohen, Simon Bonney and Blixa Bargeld are always Pole Stars when I look to them for guidance.
Except for the “On the Edge of the Light” song you recorded Accelerated in his home studio. Why did you decide to track this song with J. Robbins? Whatever the reason, everything feels and sounds cohesive.
Outside of my various colleagues in my various groups, J. was my most frequent collaborator. He has recorded and/or mixed most of the albums I’ve done in this and my previous bands, as well as many EPs and various other sessions.
With Fotocrime’s previous album, The heart of the crime, I recorded everything by myself in my house, but it was my first time tackling such a huge recording project all by myself. So, I had J. consult on the mixes, fully mix one of the tracks, and appear on a few tracks on the record. He was my personal mentor and mentor in recording and a big part of my life.
Coliseum had recorded with J. at DC’s legendary punk studio Inner Ear in July 2010, we had a day off from touring and I’ve always dreamed of recording there so half of Coliseum turned out parasites The EP was recorded there. In 2021, when I heard that Don Zientara was closing Inner Ear, I contacted J. to see if Fotocrime could go record there for a day. I wanted to go in for the last time and it turned out to be a very meaningful day for all of us as it was also J’s last time.
During this session, we tracked everything live in the studio, as a band of our kind might have done 30 years ago. The drum machine went directly to the 2″ tape machine, the synths were tuned to the drums via MIDI, the three of us played live, and even the vocals on “On the Edge of the Light” were recorded live in the studio. It was a blast.
We recorded three songs, including a cover of Government Issue, which we played on ours Niches covers EP in 2022 and a third unreleased track. “On the Edge of the Light” has become a staple of our sets over the past few years and felt like a perfect start to the album. It’s great to have that part of the story associated with this album and continue to feature J., even though I’m mostly recording myself now in my own studio, House of Foto.
On a side note, I bought a few pieces of studio gear from Don Zientara when Inner Ear closed, including a rare, old chorus that I hope was used on some of the classic recordings he made that use that sound so well. (I use it all the time.) Don happened to come to Louisville in late 2021 on a trip and brought the equipment here for me.
I picked his brain over lunch and he told me an amazing story I’d never heard about Little Menace playing at his daughter’s school carnival. They were the music for games of musical chairs for the students. I had him sign the gear I bought from him and it’s extremely important to have that in my studio and use it on my recordings.
Have you ever dropped out? There is no salvation riffs during a Fotocrime soundcheck?
I once saw an episode of some TV show where the character was an ex-rocker who often sat and played songs of his old bands in his apartment. I found it quite sad.
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Accelerated will be released on September 8 via Artoffact Records (advance order).
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