Fantômas's Suspended Animation @ 20

Wild, jump-cut post-metal from Mike Patton & crew

Fantômas — Suspended Animation

I’ve always been agnostic about Mike Patton. I don’t like Faith No More’s music at all; Tomahawk was OK at first but didn’t really stick; Mr. Bungle was Not For Me; and the other solo projects of his I’ve heard have been hit or miss, mostly miss. But in early 2005, I interviewed him for The Wire, when the fourth and to date final Fantômas album, Suspended Animation, was imminent, as was his album General Patton vs. the X-Ecutioners, a collaboration with the titular turntable squad. We had a really enjoyable conversation, and after the piece came out, I went and saw Fantômas live and had a blast. So with Suspended Animation turning 20 this month, let’s take a look back.

Fantômas, named for a French crime fiction character from the early 20th century, was a group Patton formed in 1999 with guitarist Buzz Osborne of the Melvins, bassist Trevor Dunn from Mr. Bungle, and drummer Dave Lombardo, then best known for his work in Slayer.

“It was like writing down a Christmas list, and it wasn’t a very deep one,” Patton told me. “I got all my first choices. I didn’t know how they would respond to it. I knew Buzz, but not that well. Trevor was really my only sure thing, he was like the security blanket, meaning if it all went belly-up, I could cry on his shoulder.”

Lombardo, a brilliant percussionist who was in absolute command of Slayer, particularly onstage, was Patton’s secret weapon. The guitar riffs in Fantômas songs fly by in short, noisy bursts deployed with such precision it’s like Patton is triggering them via sampler. But the drumming is a series of left turns and sudden starts and stops.

“I saw Slayer a little while ago with Dave,” Patton said to me in 2005, “and I’d seen them when I was a teenager of course, and loved it to death. But seeing them again, and seeing how effortless that music is to him — I thought I even saw him yawn a couple of times, while bashing his brains out and driving that band.”

“Over the years, I always thought he was great, but playing with him, and making him jump through every hoop imaginable and watching him do it — he’s wide-eyed. Any bizarre suggestion or anything that might be unfamiliar to him — ‘Yeah, sure, why not? Let’s try it! This is great!’ He’s just so excited about this stuff that it’s energizing and empowering.”

I interviewed Lombardo in 2023, when he released a solo percussion album on Ipecac, and found him to be exactly the open-eared, enthusiastic musician Patton described. He’s collaborated with John Zorn and Bill Laswell (I saw them perform in 2000 as Bladerunner, a group with guitarist Fred Frith and, on that night, Boredoms vocalist Eye Yamantaka) and DJ Spooky, among others, and seems to genuinely love a creative challenge. But he told me he was initially skeptical of the Fantômas project. “I said to [Patton], ‘Why do you need me? This demo sounds amazing.’ He goes, ‘Because I want to perform it live.’”

Patton wasn’t particularly interested in outside input when composing for Fantômas. “Like I do with nearly everything I write, I basically made a rough recording of myself playing all the instruments, which can be very comical”, he told me. But when it was time to actually re-record it all, it had to open up… a little.

“I write down everything, put it on a tape, and say, ‘That’s it. Play it.’ And you know, a lot of it’s hard to decipher, so I’ll have to sit down with Buzz or Dave and show them exactly what I want, and if there’s a part that comes along — well, I’m open to suggestion, let’s put it that way. But that music is, more so than any of my other groups, about precision and execution. There is a right and a wrong way of playing it. And I really feel like my role is to illustrate very clearly what to do and what not to do.”

The group’s self-titled debut featured 29 tracks (track 13 is silent) of jump-cut grindcore and sludge mixed with unidentifiable movie samples, eerie sound effects and atmospheres, and Patton’s wordless, shrieking, gabbling vocals. They ranged in length from 33 seconds to 5:07, but mostly got in and out in under 1:30, and each piece was titled “Page 1” through “Page 30”, as though the album was meant to soundtrack a particularly action-packed comic book.

After the album was out, Fantômas and the Melvins joined forces as a seven-piece “big band” (Buzz Osborne and Dave Stone on guitars, Trevor Dunn and Kevin Rutmanis on basses, Dale Crover and Dave Lombardo on drums, and Patton on vocals, samples, and electronics) for a New Year’s Eve 2000 concert at which they played Melvins songs and pieces from the first Fantômas record. The latter were given titles beyond just page numbers, like “Good Morning Slaves (Page 27)” or “She’s a Puker (Page 6)”. They also played versions of Bernard Herrmann’s theme from Cape Fear and Jerry Goldsmith’s theme from The Omen, both of which pointed the way toward the second Fantômas album.

The Director’s Cut, released in July 2001, featured radical re-arrangements of 15 movie themes ranging from The Godfather to Spider Baby, from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me to Investigation Of A Citizen Above Suspicion. In a way, it’s a kind of conceptual sequel to Zorn’s The Big Gundown: The Music of Ennio Morricone, but a lot more crass and in-your-face. It’s fun.

The third and fourth Fantômas albums, Delirium Cordia and Suspended Animation, were recorded at the same time, though they couldn’t be more different. The former was a single 74-minute piece consisting of many short musical passages in various styles or combinations of styles, glued together with dark ambient interludes and sections of dialogue meant to imply that the listener is on an operating table, receiving surgery without anesthesia. The actual music only lasts 55 minutes; the final 20 minutes of the CD (which is programmed as one long track) consist of a record needle clicking in a locked groove.

Suspended Animation, meanwhile, consists of 30 short tracks corresponding to the days of April 2005; each one lists an obscure holiday like “04/04/05 Er Tong Jie Children’s Day (Taiwan)/A Drop of Water Is a Grain of Gold Day (Turkmenistan).” The original CD edition came packaged as a calendar, illustrated by Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. The music combines the twitchy, arty grindcore of the debut with sproingy cartoon sound effects, samples from toys, and more.

“We were bouncing back and forth, depending on what instruments were around or what people were around, the entire time,” Patton told me. “We’d do a cartoonish band piece for the newest record, then ten minutes later we’d be working on a drone for the Delirium record. The only record I really had mapped out was Delirium, and I knew I’d have a little time to work out the specifics of the children’s record.”

To my ear, Suspended Animation is the best Fantômas record by far. The players have come together as a unit; the band has a voice. The pieces are more than just short parts jammed together, though there’s definitely a lot of that — they work as jagged hunks of metal, albeit cartoonish art-metal.

Watching the group perform live was even more astonishing than listening to the record. I’d seen Lombardo with Zorn, as described above, but that was improvised music: shrieking saxophone, noise guitar, deep dub bass, and the occasional eruption of double-kick death metal drums. Late in the set, Eye came onstage to scream along with Zorn, bent double with the microphone halfway down his throat and his long hair flying everywhere. And in the early 2000s, I got to see him with Slayer, which was absolutely astonishing.

Fantômas was the exact opposite of Bladerunner, a tightly rehearsed set of music performed with eye-popping precision. They were set up onstage in the only way they could have been: Patton was at stage left, behind a bank of keyboards, with several microphones including a bullhorn and what looked like a CB handset. Lombardo was at stage right, with his gigantic kit set up so he was looking directly across the stage at Patton. Osborne and Dunn were between them at the back, flanked by amps. Neither man struck any guitar-hero or rock-star poses; they watched the boss and played the riffs on cue, as focused as members of a symphony orchestra. Lombardo, too, was locked in on Patton, delivering insanely complex percussive patterns in response to the boss’s conductor-like gestures. It was one of the most mind-boggling things I’d ever seen/heard. A complete live performance from the 2005 Montreux Jazz Festival is on YouTube; watch for yourself:

It doesn’t surprise me at all that Patton retired Fantômas after Suspended Animation. There was nowhere else he could take this music. He’s done some interesting things since; I really liked Mondo Cane, a collection of Italian pop covers recorded with a big band and orchestra, and his work fronting John Zorn’s Moonchild group (with Dunn on bass, Joey Baron on drums, and other musicians, including Zorn on alto sax, organist John Medeski, guitarist Marc Ribot, and others as needed) is great. But Suspended Animation is to my ear one of the high-water marks of his career.

That’s it for now. I’ll see you on Friday, when I will ask you to buy some music.