![]() I was the most intense Trek fan, and it was my idea to get all the little Trek recordings, which we did before we even had samplers. Those two things, which came together at the very end, were the last steps in turning it into the song we now know. I said, "Can't we spruce this up, make it sound a little more aggressive, have more edge?" We ran the synthesizers through a distortion box and, basically, that turned it into that fast, staccato rhythm that sounds a little bit reminiscent of somebody scrubbing a guitar. We had this section with straight synthesizer string parts, in the background, and it's boring. There are no guitar sounds, not even sampled guitars. ![]() Also, that's when we came up with this technique to do what people think of as sampled guitars, which they're not. We added the Star Trek samples probably the most-important thing for making it memorable. That was the phase when we did the two signature sounds in that song. Fred and he brought that thing up into becoming what it eventually became. ![]() If you heard it, you'd go, "Wow, this isn't the song I know." We got this guy to do the mix, Roey Shamir. Then, we had this first unmixed version with him, but it still really wasn't there yet. We went into that song, and he's the one who knew how to make it into something cool. He’d worked heavily with Scritti Politti. Then, in the summer of '87, we were working in New York on the real version of it, with the man who eventually produced our first album, Fred Maher, who’d just come off working with Kraftwerk. We didn't have the help of a top-notch producer yet, so we gave that to them and they went, "Eh, why don't you come to New York and we'll get you a real producer?" We tried to record it in a studio in Minneapolis, and we were still so inexperienced. Can you make some changes?" Paul spruced it up again. We played it for our label, which was Tommy Boy at the time, and our manager. I went over the lyrics, added the verse lyrics and he changed the chorus lyrics. Originally, it was, "So tell me what you're thinking/Say what's on your mind/For surely we have time, girl/To say what's on your mind." That was the original chorus. He had the chorus down fairly well, but it was a whole different set of words. I actually still have a recording of that. Paul had a song he was working on, then we had this original demo, which I still have. Take us through the creation of “What's on Your Mind”. Then, there's this other circle in there that's hard to place, this thread of an irreverent, Avant Garde sense of humor about everything. We're at the intersection of what you'd call pop music and synth music, or synth pop music, and dance music. Into which class does it go? With any band, I think of it as a Venn diagram. How would you classify the band's sound?Ĭlassify. We’ve read/heard many descriptions of InSoc’s music: pop, techno, synth pop, new wave, etc. We're not depending on this to pay our rent anymore, so we don't hurry and don't have any specific plans. We'll do, maybe, a show every two or three months, and we put out albums in 2006, then another one around 2012, 2014, and we're working on some new music now. The last decade-plus, it's been more of a hobby, something we do for a little extra money and just to do some fun things. We didn't do much of anything with the band for some years and then, mid 00's, we started playing shows again on a one-off basis. Then we came to our senses in the mid-90's and went our separate ways, got real jobs. That was when the band was our fulltime job for all three of us. We had our heyday back in the late 80's, early 90's when we were Warner Brothers recording artists. What are you doing these days, and what has the band been up to in terms of recording/gigs? recently chatted with Kurt Larson, who filled us in on the creation of “What’s on Your Mind,” detailed how Adam and Leonard Nimoy helped secure the Trek samples, and previewed InSoc’s plans for Star Trek: The Cruise II. Now, nearly 30 years later, those songs remain incredibly entertaining and have paved the way for Information Society – which consists of co-founders Kurt Larson and Paul Robb, and James Cassidy – to perform aboard both legs of Star Trek: The Cruise II when the Norwegian Jade sets sail in a couple of weeks.
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