In case you hadn’t heard, the headliners for next year’s MONA FOMA were announced earlier this month. It was arguably the quirky Tasmanian festival’s most impressive lineup announcement to date, and we don’t even know who else is playing yet.
It almost doesn’t matter, since the reaction to the news that Faith No More frontman Mike Patton and Maynard James Keenan’s Puscifer would soon be sharing a bill in Australia was enough to get fans excited and FOMO-ing all over social media.
But as Patton fans know, a tour announcement from the prolific vocalist, whose range rivals the likes of Mariah Carey, could mean just about anything. Recent Patton tours have involved everything from Faith No More to orchestral Italian pop music.
So what is tētēma?
As Patton recently explained to the Sydney Morning Herald, it’s the mind-bending collaboration between himself and Aussie composer Anthony Pateras and he’s not actually 100 percent sure the two of them can pull it off. “I can’t lie to you, I’m a little bit nervous,” he said.
“I don’t know how we’re going to pull this stuff off… To be honest – how should I say? – it’s a logistical nightmare.” Patton refers to the intricate and ambitious collaboration, which yielded the album Geocidal, as “world music from another world”.
The story behind the creation of the album is as much of a curveball as the music. It involved Pateras moving to a convent in rural France where he locked himself away for 10 days before emerging with a suite of left-of-field rhythmic soundscapes.
The album, in the making since 2009, was finalised in San Francisco over 48 hours. “The interesting thing about the record is that every element is recorded in a different country, and this gives the sound a displaced, almost vaporous intensity,” said Pateras in a statement.
“I moved country twice during its genesis as well… the whole Geocidal thing is about coming from no place, re-birthing, watching the place you are from be altered beyond recognition that you have nothing to do with it anymore.”
So those fans expecting to hear a rendition of ‘Epic’ are out of luck and should strap yourselves in for some seriously twisted and challenging sound art. But as Patton told the Sydney Morning Herald, more music from Faith No More is not out of the question.
“I don’t know whether or not we’re going to attack it,” Patton told the outlet, “but there is some stuff we wrote around the time of the last one and said, ‘Why don’t we save this for the next record?’ So we’ll see.”
