Interview with Mike Patton

THE BELIEVER: Do you ever practice singing?

MIKE PATTON: Nope. Never have and probably never will.

BLVR: So you just make these sounds naturally?

MP: I started on a really basic level. I was just screaming. Then I realized, Yeah, well, I’m OK at that. Let’s try some other things. And I discovered this thing called singing. So I snuck it in every now and again. In Mr. Bungle, we easily got bored with what we were doing, which was, at that point, in the mid-’80s, death metal and hardcore, which has a very limited palate. It’s so isolated up there [in Eureka, California], but I was lucky enough to work at a record store, so I was able to hear different things. But it wasn’t like we could go to a concert every night and get our minds blown. And this is what I love about small-town bands or musicians. They gotta work hard to be inspired. There were no venues when I lived there. There was a bar and grill that played blues. There was a bowling alley for, like, five minutes. We would pool together money and rent out a grange hall, like an Elks Lodge type of place. We’d buy the insurance and put on a show. A few hundred people would show up and we’d be happy. So I guess the answer to your question is: I learned what I could do with my voice on stages and because of the people that I was around. It wasn’t me sitting in a room by myself. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was figuring it out on the fly. And I feel like I still am.

BLVR: Did some of your extended-singing techniques come from imitating sounds in the world?

MP: Well, from a young age I was definitely imitating birds, but I didn’t know it at the time. This is what my parents tell me. Once I started making these weird sounds with my voice, they gave me this little flexi-disc of mouth sounds, like guys that could make odd sounds. I don’t know why they gave it to me, but that was one of my favorite records. It all comes from what I’ve discovered and the things I’ve been able to try. Play with a saxophone player and a drummer, see what happens. I’m not a studied, learned, academic musician.

BLVR: You’ve played with a lot of musicians who are learned, though.

MP: Those are the people you learn from. I think that one of the things that really cracked my head open was starting to improvise, after I met John Zorn. He encouraged me. And when you come from a band- and song-based background, it’s like, How do you improvise? I mean, that’s literally the way that I thought: Well, what do I do if I don’t know what I’m doing? He’s like, “That’s the whole point.” And when you start to kind of immerse yourself in that improvisation culture, you gotta be comfortable enough with your instrument to throw yourself into a really potentially dangerous situation. Sometimes that’s not so kind for the audience, but, hey, I’m not sure that we’re really here for an audience.

Read it in full at The Believer