Decrypting Under Midnight

Oh, the irony.

An industrial band comprised of two brothers writes a forward-looking industrial album that explores faith in the context of a technology-driven, dystopian future. Fast-forward almost twenty years, and the band’s future is our present: we have become troubled technophiles and then some. But are the brothers behind this band anywhere to be found on the Internet—that hive mind that allows us to access information about just about anyone?

No. Frankie and dB Allen, futurists though they were, are nowhere to be found in the digital domain. Google’s all-seeing eyes cannot find any more facts about them than what I already have in my possession.

A survey of my evidence for the existence of the brothers Allen: One self-titled debut album. A second record titled Void. A ninety-nine cent “Cybervision” cassingle and a low-budget music video for the same song on YouTube.

How could siblings who sang of “jacking into the mainframe” on albums released through an imprint of Word Records—the most mainstream of all Christian labels—disappear without leaving  footprints of some kind on the Web? The words of a tech-head friend of mine from high school come to mind: “Format C-colon.” It is as if Frankie and dB Allen have somehow succeeded in erasing themselves from some cosmic hard-drive.

Imagine my surprise then, when I discover an archived Chicago Tribune article titled, “Voyagers in Cyberspace: They Have Seen the Future and It’s Nothin’ But Net.” Written in 1995, the piece explores the Internet as a largely unexplored “final frontier.”

One of the featured interviewees is someone named Caesar Kalinowski, who discusses his band, Under Midnight, without a single reference to Frankie or dB Allen. As it turns out, the brothers Allen never existed in the first place. Frankie and dB were pseudonyms all along.

I soon find Caesar on Twitter and ask if I can interview him about Under Midnight, as nature abhors a vacuum. So does cyberspace, I tell him. And there is a dearth of information on the band on the Web. I must fill this information gap with words.

Caesar agrees, but then we struggle to coordinate our schedules. Before I can interview him, I learn that dB Allen of Under Midnight is none other than Mark Robertson—former member of The Altar Boys, The Stand, This Train, and Rich Mullins’s Ragamuffin Band, and current member of The Dirt Daubers and The Legendary Shackshakers. I interview Mark via Facebook, and shortly thereafter interview Caesar via Skype.

The following interview is a compilation of the responses I received from Mark and Caesar. Neither interviewee read or influenced the other’s responses. This interview then, should read something like two independent Gospel accounts of the story of Under Midnight.

Chad Thomas Johnston: Where did Under Midnight come from, creatively speaking? What were the origins of the band, both in name and concept?

Mark Robertson: Caesar came up with the name. I was in a band called The Stand and we were signed to Wonderland. I coproduced the In Three Days record, and Caesar thought I had strong production instincts and asked me to come up with a project.

I’d been messing around a lot with sampling/programming, was a huge fan of Einstürzende Neubauten, Test Dept, Skinny Puppy, etc. I was also intrigued by the second wave industrial bands that used metal/punk guitar: Ministry’s Land of Rape and Honey and Nine Inch Nails’s first record, which appealed more to Caesar than the original industrial ‘musique concrete’ thing I was into. I had also gone off the deep end for cyberpunk literature—William Gibson, in particular. Blade Runner was a very obvious influence, with all that dystopian stuff.

Caesar Kalinowski: At the time, I thought we needed a name like PM Dawn—such a cool band name—and then Under Midnight came up. And then Thom Wolfe came up with the logo, and it was so freakin’ perfect.

CTJ: Why did you choose to use pseudonyms?

MR: There were a few reasons, at least from my point of view. Consider the two members. I came out of bands like The Altar Boys and The Stand, and Caesar was a record company owner with an iffy reputation and a mullet. I thought if we kept our identities hidden and left no footprints, it would be more interesting and people would be less likely to pre-judge it. Also, if it sucked, it wouldn’t reflect on me!

CK: I used the pseudonym Frankie Allen because I didn’t want to be known as an artist. When we did our interviews for radio and magazines during the Under Midnight era, we didn’t have Skype yet, so we did it over the phone. We would do it in the studio and grind our voices up just like on the record. People were like, “What is going on with the connection?” And we always played it off like, “What?” “Your voice sounds grainy and weird.” “It sounds normal to me.” We’d never break the veil. It was just to be weird, you know?

CTJ: What can you tell me about the Sonic Temple, where you guys recorded your albums?

CK: We recorded in this Masonic temple our record label bought for Wonderland’s operations—Wonderland being a boutique division of Word Records. Forty-thousand square feet of space, and based in Elgin, Illinois. We took the third floor and converted it into our studio. It had a giant Egyptian room, painted from ceiling to floor to look like Egypt. We built the control rooms in there, and it was crazy.

CTJ: Oh my. So it was a Masonic temple, and then you guys transformed into the Sonic Temple—that’s the kind of wordplay I love, man.

CK: You got it! And down on the first floor, there was a 1,200-seat ballroom with a wrap-around balcony that looked like the Fillmore West. It had a huge stage and primo acoustics. Because of that, the Wonderland Ballroom became the stop for all the Christian alternative bands for four or five years.

After we shut down the label, we sold the building to the church next door. The guy who was the youth pastor there was the promoter for most of the shows we did. He and his church bought that building and took it over. Last time I was in town and looked at it, it looked dark like they had shuttered it and were doing some remodeling. We sold it in 2000, so it’s been awhile.

CTJ: If you don’t mind me asking, how many copies did each Under Midnight album sell? I can find no records of this anywhere. I’m guessing this meant it never went gold, platinum, or diamond.

MR: Ha! By any serious standards, those records didn’t sell too great. By indie standards though, they did quite well. The label used to give me sales reports till I asked where my royalties were—then they stopped! The first record did 30,000 units or so. The second one, which I think was way better, got a lot less support from the parent label, and that was that.

CTJ: Why industrial music? Did you just have a deep, abiding love for it? And what bands influenced Under Midnight’s sound?

MR: Honestly, Wonderland needed to fill a quota. The parent label required them to put out a certain amount of records a year. Caesar approached me and said to come up with something I really wanted to do, and that’s how we started. I’d been sampling and programming for years at that point—just for fun—and saw industrial music as the new punk rock.

Any sound you could find could become a musical instrument or voice. You didn’t need a band. I just loved the idea of it.

My big influences were Einstürzende Neubauten, Test Dept, Throbbing Gristle, Current 93—that kind of thing. But Ministry’s Land of Rape and Honey and the first Nine Inch Nails record seemed really innovative by introducing heavy guitars to industrial music.

Sadly, that sound was quickly adopted by bands I just cannot stand, and it sounded like jock metal with sampled beats and whatnot. Caesar and I were rarely on the same page, musically speaking, which made things rough, but probably more interesting, to be fair. I really don’t know! He liked Bon Jovi and INXS and I really could never relate to that stuff, being a lifelong art fag.

CK: I gotta’ be honest with you—what was blowin’ our sails full was that first Nine Inch Nails record and certain Ministry cuts. I was also listening to the Jesus and Mary Chain—

CTJ: See, I always thought Under Midnight sounded like an industrial version of the Jesus and Mary Chain. Not like Psychocandy, obviously—with all of that paint-peeling feedback—but their later stuff, which still featured drum machines. The songwriting reminded me of them, too.

MR: I think the “common ground” bands were Ministry, Meat Beat Manifesto, and Front 242.

CTJ: So who did what in the band?

 MR: We both wrote and sang. Most of the material was co-written. He did all of the engineering and I did most of the programming and sampling. I sang more than he did, but I’d have to hear the songs again to tell you who sang what. We also brought in Beki Hemingway to sing some—I’m not sure she’s ever forgiven me for that! Kurt Bachman from Believer also played guitar.

Beki Hemingway: (It was a) new adventure. I hadn’t ever sung any industrial music, and I definitely hadn’t played a character on an album before. I sang backup for Larry Norman and The Stand, and for a jangly college rock band—that was my experience up to that point. I joined This Train around the time of the recording of the (first) Under Midnight project.

My exposure to that genre was very limited. I had Ministry’s early New Wave stuff on some mix tapes high school friends made me, and I was vaguely familiar with Skinny Puppy, but I didn’t pay much attention.

The singing itself didn’t seem so out of character. I loved it that those guys wanted me to come out of my shell and be loud!

CTJ: Tell me about the process of making an Under Midnight record. Did the albums have lengthy incubation times, or did you write them relatively rapidly?

CK: We would work eighteen-hour days for four or six weeks straight, and those records would be created entirely in that time. Because we weren’t a band that had nothing else going on but that—I was producing about a record a month during those years. The average time in the studio is about a month. You had a month to record and mix, which is pretty good.

In our case, when it came to that first Under Midnight record, it also had to be written in that month. So our first record went real fast. We probably worked on Void for two to three months, I think. We had a little bit of time to write and really dig for cooler samples. We would spend hours just watching bad movies, just looking for a line or a noise.

MR: Obviously, we wore out Blade Runner on that first record! I sampled a lot of Lawnmower Man, because that movie sounded great, but was a pretty crappy film. I wanted to see if you could sample bad acting! Aliens was another one. The big budget sci-fi movies had such great sounds. I watched I don’t know how many movies, looking for interesting sounds.

CK: We would sit and read Wired magazine, looking for weird phrases. We would sit in the studio and just read through those and look for terminology or threads of fear within the culture and wonder, “What would be the Christian Gospel response to that if there is one? And if there isn’t one, should there be?” So yeah, it wasn’t all just noise. We thought about it.

CTJ: When I heard your records as a teenager, it seemed to me that Frankie and dB Allen were futurist theologians who were trying to figure out what being a Christian looked like in a world where technology has altered the human story in fundamental ways.  

It’s been 20 years since your self-titled debut was released, so we are living in the future—at least as your 1992-self might have thought of it. How does that future measure up to your expectations? Do you think there are elements of our present day and age that make Under Midnight’s records seem prophetic?

MR: I think it’s exactly the way we envisioned it, but not because we were so smart. Orwell and Huxley saw all of this years before we were born. Things are moving along more or less the way it appeared they would back then. The cautionary side of those records is still the same: Be careful what you wish for.

Prophetic would be a very generous thing to say about those records. Maybe you had to be there, but the church was very concerned with virtual reality, the World Wide Web, all that stuff. And I was reading tons of cyberpunk and futurist writing. The concept seemed pretty obvious to me at the time. Think of Under Midnight as the evangelical soundtrack to Blade Runner. That’s the easiest way to describe it.

CTJ: Has Under Midnight ever received due credit for inventing “cyberbilly” with the song “Oh Boy”?

MR: Caesar really wanted to fuse electronics with rockabilly. It had been done before us but not so over the top. I dunno. Should we receive credit for that? Seems like a dubious honor! It was just an idea, and it was fun to do so we did it.

CK: Cyberbilly! I so enjoyed producing that song that it almost took over things. I was like, “Oh man, I just want to do this! I want my agent to go license Beach Boys tracks and all this old, cool rockabilly and surf stuff, and I just want to cyber it all up! That would just be so fun! I think we can get a dance hit out of it!”

CTJ: What prompted you to write and record such a song?

CK: I love rockabilly and always have, and love the really campy old beach movies that had rockabilly bands playing in the background, wearing suits and junk. So I was searching out samples one day, and I just started dropping some of these rockabilly licks over some heavier beats. Then I played the guitars on there that aren’t loops of other things.

“Oh Boy!” is a reference to Buddy Holly’s song “Oh Boy!” While Elvis is the king of rock ‘n’ roll, when it came that whole sort of twang it was all about Buddy. So “Oh Boy!” just sort of became a nod to that. It didn’t really fit the story arc, but we made it fit the story arc.

It’s a sonic mess. It’s so layered. But it’s a beautiful mess. It just came out of playing with rockbilly samples and finding that many of them were in the same key, and then stretching their time signatures to fit. And no one had done it.

CTJ: I remember reading at one time that there were plans to release a cyberpunk novel that corresponded with the Under Midnight albums. After 1994, I never heard another word about this. What would this book have been like?

MR: It would have been a Gibson-esque graphic novel. A dear friend of mine, Troy Moody, did the libretto for Void, based on our suggestions. He did a much better job than we could’ve. Sadly, Troy fell into a serious alcoholism problem that ultimately took his life. Losing Troy in such a sad, senseless way killed my desire to move forward on the project.

CTJ: Under Midnight went silent after the release of Void in 1994. Why?

MR: Everything has a shelf life, you know? The funding was gone and Caesar and I weren’t really working together any longer. The project sort of killed itself.

A label approached me about doing something and I did a three or four song demo that never got released. It was called Saltbox. It was okay. Again, I had a label breathing down my neck to make it more commercial. I can’t really do that, even though I’ve written “hits.” It just didn’t interest me.

By then I was playing full time with Rich Mullins and This Train. I had full creative control in This Train, which felt pretty awesome. I was also into exploring American Roots music by then. I’ve done tons of electronic stuff for TV, but not as an artist—should I?

CTJ: Thom Wolfe designed the art for your records. I thought it was just outstanding, and it was what made me buy the first Under Midnight album, in fact. How did he end up on your radars?

CK: Thom was this college kid with Flock of Seagulls hair that was working at one of the smallest Christian bookstores in Lane County, Illinois, when I was a salesman for Refuge Records and I was on the road. Thom was the only cool guy there. It was this old “blue hair” kind of Christian gift store—I lived pretty close to it—and they just happened to have some music in the corner.

I found out that he was an art student in college, so I said, “I don’t know anything about art, but we’ve got this little label, and we need people who can design album covers. Can you do that?” So he designed the first Flock 14 album cover with tape and blue pencils on my dining room table. I hired Thom from that, and he became our designer.

I remember when Thom sold his personal music gear—he pawned it—to buy his first Macintosh. I said “Why did you do that, bro?” He’s like, “Because this is how it’s going, man. Design happens on computers now.” “I’m like, ‘Are you sure it’s worth selling your gear for?” But he knew.

He basically lived in this little dinky apartment and pawned everything to get this Mac and started designing on the computer, and immediately things got better looking. I hired him out of obscurity from a Christian bookstore and probably paid him even less, and we became very good friends.

MR: Thom was a huge fan of Vaughan Oliver at that time. Gosh, what a gifted artist he is! Thom was a good friend. I actually introduced him to his wife.

The label made Thom pull back a bit on the gross stuff. The original design forVoid was way more gross and awesome, but the label really put the pressure on us to back that down. It featured nudity in a very graphic, violent way. I thought it was amazing, but not so much to a CCM label!

I lost touch with Thom when he left Chicago, but he was a very dear friend. He did the artwork for the first two This Train records, too. We’re fortunate we found him before he got famous. Within a few years there would have been no way we could have afforded him!

CTJ: Did any secular industrial artists provide feedback about the Under Midnight records? Also, did you feel supported by your Christian contemporaries?

MR: I don’t recall any secular feedback one way or the other.

As far as support from our Christian peers? No. I was friends with Wally from Deitiphobia and Scott from Circle of Dust. They could barely hide their contempt for Under Midnight! We had talked about doing an industrial “supergroup” with me, Scott, and Wally, but R. E. X. pulled the funding out from under us at the last minute. Circle of Dust made the best industrial records in the CCM scene by a mile, and he knew it. That guy was way ahead of the rest of us. Wally was close, but didn’t really have the studio chops or budgets to pull it off.

The technology still wasn’t there to be able to do DIY stuff with the kind of quality you need to sell records, and UM had a huge advantage. The first record took four months of full-time work to make.

(CTJ Notes to Himself: Hmm. Mark says four months. Caesar says one month. Who is right?)

That’s a lot of studio time. We had the best studio, the best gear, and the biggest budgets, but I don’t feel we came close to what Circle of Dust did, artistically.

CTJ: Caesar, you’re actively involved in ministry now. What exactly do you do? How does your current work relate, if at all, to your days as a producer and musician?

CK: I love music as much as ever, but I don’t have time to practice my craft anymore. My wife is always encouraging it, but I think it’s a bygone chapter.

I’m an author now, and a speaker. It all has to do with church-planting stuff. My whole life is about helping people start and form missional communities.

I’ve written three books in the last six months. There’s The Gospel Primer. Then there’s Transformed, which I wrote for Zondervan for the general market. Then last week I wrote a little ebook called Not the Church—it’s just ten simple little iPad drawings and conversations. It takes discipleship and this whole missional conversation thing and makes it stupid-simple.

I’m on the road half the time. Fifty percent of my life I’m not at home, which is tough. But I’m out developing other communities. It’s amazing.

CTJ: What are you doing these days musically, Mark?

MR: For the past eleven or twelve years I’ve been playing with the Legendary Shackshakers, which has been awesome—we have one of the best frontmen of all time. Most of my other work is all upright bass, which is strange, but that’s what seems to interest folks about me as a player at this point.

I have a side thing called Prayer Flag where I play electric bass. It’s noisy, artsy dance music in a late ‘70s post-punk kinda’ vein. I’d like to pursue that a bit more, maybe do some This Train stuff, and if I do an electronic record again, it’ll most likely be solo, or Saltbox.

I can’t believe after all these years I still get to make so much music. Life is good.

CTJ: Would you ever consider making a third Under Midnight record?

CK: We actually were working on a third Under Midnight record at one point—it was going to be much broader musically. There were horns and crazy acoustic stuff. We wanted to have a live drum kit playing through most of it on top of all the sequencing.

MR: Ha! Caesar and I toyed with the idea maybe ten years ago, but it really wasn’t meant to be.

I think we’ve ripped off Blade Runner enough for one lifetime!

Visit Caesar on the web at www.caesarkalinowski.com, and follow him on Twitter: @CaesarKal. Visit Mark Robertson at facebook.com/legendaryshackshakers, and follow him on Twitter: @theshackshakers.