Jane in Space’s Eerie Futuristic Industrial Sound on ‘Gorerunner’ Wreaks Havoc in the Television of our Mind’s Eye

By Jessica Brant

In David Lynch’s 1983 cult classic film, “Videodrome,” viewers watch as Professor Brian O’Blivion discusses the implications of a television-obsessed society during a panel talk recorded for television. “The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye,” he declares, and as the film’s story progresses, viewers are pointed to the all-too-true realities of this penetrative statement.

Jesse Jensen and Tom Vickers of Brooklyn experimental dyad Jane in Space capture this Lynchian perspective in their video for “Eat Your Face,” the first single released off of their latest album, Gorerunner. While not facsimiled for the film, “Eat Your Face” should be placed within David Lynch’s surrealist realm of storytelling—glitchy static effects and low-fi graphical storytelling intends for viewers to feel trapped inside a fantasy version of a Snuff TV show, unable to decipher what is real and what is fabricated for television.

The references to the film and its director reveal themselves, little by little, within the lyrical content of “Eat Your Face”— Puzzle pieces in this messed up jigsaw earth, several near misses now it’s us against the curse. The imagery behind the lyric brings to mind an answer that David Lynch gave during an interview when asked how ideas come (although more positive in nature):

“More often than not, in small fragments. I like to think of it as, in the other room, the puzzle is all together, but they keep flipping in just one piece at a time.”

For Jesse and Tom, whose eerie, futuristic sound is an outgrowth of their musical partnership with early industrial trailblazer Keith Hillebrandt of Nine Inch Nails acclaim, this is how projects like Gorerunner come together, piece by piece. The duo spoke with me over the phone about their creative process on the album, the poetry in performance as an electronic rock/industrial band and how relying on instinct and feeling to carry an idea is a true artist’s method of creation.

Gorerunner, your latest album, is a very well thought-out project. Talk to me a little bit about the concept behind the first single you released, “Eat Your Face.”

Jesse: Permian Strata directed the video for “Eat Your Face.” We’ve always gotten on well together because both of us really like David Lynch’s and David Cronanburg’s aesthetic …the video is actually a remake of a Cronanburg movie from the 80s. We really tried to capture that feel, the whole mind control idea through television. I think we really wanted to do our own sort of take on that…we think it’s a visual style that lends itself well to our music…There’s also sort of this uncomfortable tension over it that I think we were able to work into a narrative well.

“Breaking Glass,” the second single, is a nice break in the middle of the album. Why did you decide to carve a new soundscape here, and is its placement on the album strategic? It’s very light and airy compared to the heavier, rougher sounds.

Jesse: “Breaking Glass” doesn’t sound like rest of the album, but it was built with the same palette….”Breaking Glass” is a song that really found the palette that would be used to make the rest of the album…it was a song I wrote with acoustic piano, and my instinct is always to take that stuff and move it into a more synthetic realm. In making it (the song “Breaking Glass”), I realized that the sound I was hearing was the acoustic piano and big aggressive drums, and the electronics would be the swarm that developed around it, but not the centerpiece itself. After realizing that, all of the other songs just started to click into place within that universe…and while the other songs toy with dread, you’re right, this one is much softer. But for us it was a way to not break up the dread, but to accentuate the dread…and placing it in the flow (of the album) like that, it kind of allows us to pick back up again (sonically) and hit the hardest downhill slope after that.

Tom: We actually came up with a concept with the director Paul Bland to remake, or pay homage to, the final scene of a Tarkovsky film from 1979 called “Stalker”…it’s a little different from all of our other videos, which kind of have an erratic style. “Breaking Glass” is a very moody piece that turned into something quite eerie…it’s the antithesis to the video for the previous single “Eat Your Face.”

It’s also a very poetic metaphor. Is the writing coming from a poetic place?

Jesse: I’m pretty bad at writing songs. What I try to do is make feelings or textures or things that accompany visuals and make them interesting. For Gorerunner I had this very specific image, this idea of somebody lost in the jungle or forest. If you’ve ever really been lost, it’s a terrifying feeling…It’s very scary because the forest kind of obscures much of your sight…so it was this feeling I had of something closing in and you know it’s coming, that was the sensation I was trying to create. And so I took this and sold this mental image to Tom, who came up with the lyrics, and that’s usually our process, and I think in this way, the lyrics and music inform each other.

So the process of creation is about relying on feeling for you two more than anything?

Jesse: I think the process is kind of anxiety-inducing all of the time…as an artist, it can be this feeling like you have to create…and that can quickly turn into a vicious cycle of defeat. A lot of artists find ideas, grab them…I think it’s more of knowing how to turn energy on and exploring that energy. When something catches, it’s our jobs as artists to hold onto the idea and see where it takes us.

Tom: Sometimes lyrically, on this record, I used what Jesse had tentatively titled a piece of his music, to influence me. For example, “Breaking Glass” was called that from the beginning – Jesse titled it that before there were even any lyrics. I took the baton and ran with that title, and it became this beautiful metaphor lyrically. The whole being lost in the forest idea that Jesse was just talking about too actually became a lyric on the title track, “Gorerunner”. So I will sometimes let the images and feelings that Jesse has relayed to me about the music he has created to influence how I approach it lyrically – on both “Breaking Glass” and the song “Gorerunner” that was certainly the case anyway.

I hear that Tom is influenced by 90s Britpop. Do you hear that influence creeping into the music?

Tom: I was 12 in 1996, and that time period, 1996, 1995 were the years that Britpop came to a head, so I do think I am influenced by it…I think our music has a lot of those 60s pop sensibilities, which Britpop brought back, and they slip into some poppy alternative melodies. A lot of my melodies are very poppy. I am definitely into that 90s style of guitar music. I would say that Britpop was the first genre that I got into, but my friend Tom and I were also head banging to our older sisters’ Nirvana records when we were eight, so those types of bands and Britpop were both I guess my coming-of-age music.

Britpop is very simple in its production and a little more upbeat, and industrial/electronic rock is more driven by sound manipulation and darker moods. When you guys first formed this duo, did you set out to marry the two or did it just kind of happen organically with your backgrounds interacting with each other?

Jesse: It happened organically. Tom and I definitely have some overlapping influences that give us some common vocabulary and allow us to create music that is not insular. The best thing about Tom is that he does not think like me, and I think that I make Tom uncomfortable with his vocals and it keeps him from falling into his own traps.

Tom: Yeah I think the tug of war that Jesse and I have makes the music far more interesting than if we were both into exactly the same music and always had the same vision. It’s resulted in some interesting, and slightly bizarre, comparisons. A friend of ours stated that “Eat Your Face” sounded like an “Industrial Beck.” Someone else said that one of our new songs was like “Damon Albarn singing over Deftones.” I don’t necessarily agree with those comparisons – although they are awesome – but I think they confirm that Jesse and I will pull a song in different directions and then eventually rein it in after we’ve thrown it in the deep end for a bit. It makes for a much more interesting sound than if we both wanted it exactly the same way. Jesse and I constantly challenge each other as musicians.

Do you think electronic rock and industrial are challenging genres to master in both a studio and performance setting?

Tom: I would say live our music moves further away from industrial and into electronic rock. I remember the first gig we ever played was an electronic dance night…since then our songs have been growing and changing…I don’t think it’s quite difficult to master live…the beauty of playing live is that these styles of songs sound different than on record and that creates a different experience. Looking back on all of the rehearsals we’ve had, you can tell our songs have grown so much. Andrew Tell, who plays guitar with us live and also plays some of the guitar on the new record, really changes things up live. He’s playing live guitar on some songs from our first record that don’t originally have any guitar, so he’s created his own guitar parts for them. This has really modified the songs from their original incarnations – it feels like a refreshing invigoration of sorts, especially on the older songs. In terms of Andrew’s guitar on the new record, one of my favorite moments is the crazy, almost psychedelic, guitar solo during the bridge of “Eat Your Face.”

Jesse: If you go to Spotify and you type industrial, 99 percent of music that comes up is not my cup of tea. When I think of industrial music, it’s really sonically adventurous, because I think industrial has gone away from those routes and toward weird electronic subsets of goth. But what is very cool about performing live, is actually the fact that you can be so open (with these genres)…because these are rock songs done with a different kind of paint brush, when it comes time to reinvent them live, it’s exciting because now there’s a tension that didn’t exist on the recording…Now there’s this mechanical heart, and once you put people on top of it, it feels like a fight. You don’t have that with other genres. For us it’s like, we’ve got a song, parts, now how do we make it something else? It’s a lot of work, but it’s really fun to do.

I think crossover artists understand the performance element, taking a style to make it their own in every way possible, even outside of an immediate comfort zone.

Jesse: I think embracing performance is to be honest about performance, and that is the key to unlocking all of that [understanding]. When you’re honest, the emotion is trying to come from a different place. As an artist, you have an obligation to make yourself uncomfortable every now and then, otherwise you’re just masturbating.

Tom: That escalated quickly (laughs).

Tom: I agree. The lyric “this is who you are, this is what you think, you belong in this box” from our song “Say Something” was actually inspired by the idea of everyone, especially on the internet, constantly trying to put you in boxes and label you. It’s like you take a Buzzfeed quiz telling you whether you are an introvert or an extrovert. It maddens me. Not everyone is that one-dimensional; people are complicated. We try to straddle different elements in our music while coming from that different place.

To keep up with future projects and show dates, visit www.janeinspace.com.