S ome things begin with love, but A Place to Kill, the new project from Filter frontman Richard Patrick and Phoenix photogra- pher and There Is No Us singer Jim Louvau, began with no love, or rather a song of that name. Louvau first met Patrick in 2008 when interviewing him for an article, “and we’ve somehow stayed in each other’s orbit,” Louvau says, “because we do have a lot of mutual friends and industry peers and artists in general.” “Plus he’s a photographer, so he’s always taking photos of the bands,” Patrick adds. In addition to his musical work, Louvau has been photographing musicians and performances for over 20 years and in the last seven has directed music videos for Kerry King, Jerry Cantrell and Poppy as well as shorts for Maynard James Keenan and Puscifer. Nine Inch Nails has licensed some of his work for their merchandise. He is a frequent Phoenix New Times contributor. During a Filter performance, Patrick invited Louvau onstage to do the screaming parts in the chorus of “No Love.” “I was shocked at how loud and how cool it sounded,” Patrick recalls. In 2020, Patrick again called upon Louvau and his powerful scream when recording the Filter song “Murica,” which addresses the political turmoil of the time in its lyrics — “They got us right where they want us / At each other’s throats” — and video. “I had to tuck (Louvau’s vocals) behind mine so that he wouldn’t overpower me,” Patrick recalls. “It’s pretty intimidating to hear this guy on a microphone. His voice is so insanely loud.” The volume of Louvau’s scream is such that only certain recording gear can handle it. “I have this big, beautiful $6,000 mic, this amazing custom microphone,” Patrick says, “and there’s no way he could use it.” They instead use a broadcast microphone “that can take the abuse” of Louvau’s voice. Around the same time as the recording of “Murica,” Patrick started buying synthe- sizers. “I started experimenting with different loops and different sounds,” he recalls. This interest in synthesizers was, in some ways, part of a return to an earlier way of making music. “When I did the first Filter records,” Patrick says, “it was me and a computer.” As his career progressed, more people got involved with the music, and Patrick recalls “losing that interface between me and the computer” from using a lot of producers to make the records, a practice he describes as a bad habit. He began working to regain those chops because eventually, it became more fun to work on synthesized music and be more self-reliant. He recorded and sang on some of these ideas, but decided he “wanted a super- screamer,” and reached out to Louvau. Both knew at the outset that this would be a new project, neither Filter nor There Is No Us. GUITAR-FREE ZONE Part of this difference comes in how Patrick and Louvau compose for the new project. “In both of our other projects, there is a lot more structure in the writing, a lot more verse, chorus, verse, bridge,” Louvau says. “A Place to Kill songs don’t follow any sort of standard structure.” For APTK, Louvau says, “We’re not using a guitar as the writing tool of choice,” instead “making really heavy music with synths and keys and very little guitar.” Case in point: “Jet Engine,” the single from the APTK EP, delivers a heavy sound without a single guitar. An unapologetically defiant song (“I’m the jet engine of fuck you / I live my life the way that I want to, so fuck you / Take now, all that I need to / Watch now as I bleed you”), “Jet Engine” takes its name from a remark by producer Sean Beavan referring to Louvau as “the jet engine of fuck you,” which Louvau consid- ered “a great compliment” to his voice and music. The motif at the forefront of the mix is, Patrick says, “a handcrafted sound I created on the Sequential Pro-3,” a hybrid multi-filter synthesizer. Although the EP is, in Louvau’s descrip- tion, “one of the most aggressive industrial- related releases in years,” there are nonetheless moments of contrast. He describes the EP’s closing song, “Something Inside Me,” as “the most mellow track tempo-wise” with “a bit of a trip-hop vibe,” a song in which he wanted something “vocally and lyrically” aggressive (“Something inside me comes out at night / The edge of the blade keeps me alive”) but that would be “something that was also not for the boys.” Of the overall sound of A Place to Kill, namely the choice to eschew guitars, Patrick says, “I want it to be as synthesized and digital as possible. For Filter, it starts with a guitar or a bass and the idea that this is going to be a Filter song. I can write with an acoustic, and it’s still going to come out a Filter song.” When composing for A Place to Kill, however, “it’s starting with a sample of someone crying or something.” The song “What Feels Right,” the one track on the EP with guitar, presents the only exception. Louvau and Patrick were near the end of the sessions for the EP, Louvau recalls, “sort of figuring out what was missing.” Patrick had presented Louvau with an early version of the song with the only lyric at that point being, “Hey / You gotta do what feels right / Now.” Louvau suggested changing “Hey” to “Hate,” after which, Louvau recalls, “the song took flight,” and the two finished the lyrics together (including “It’s them against us, not you versus me / This hate and division is all that they breed”) and agreed to add guitar to the song. When it came time to name the new project, Patrick originally settled on The Killing Fields, but, finding the name already taken by other groups, he modified the name to A Place to Kill. APOCALYPSE BY ERIC VANDERWALL DELIVERS KNIFE-SHARP COMMENTARY AND MIC-BREAKING SCREAMS. Richard Patrick, left, and Jim Louvau of A Place to Kill. (Photos by Tony Aguilera/Design by Dana Mackenzie)
