Prayer TowerPrayer TowerPrayer Tower is essentially the solo project of musician Robert Weston. Weston, however, prefers to see the project as a "band," even when it is just him.
"It really is a band in a sense, whether it's just myself or five different people," he explains. "Prayer Tower is more of an extension of the music than just calling myself Robert Weston. You don't see very many artists going by their names in the industrial genre of music."
Purists will argue that Prayer Tower are not really "industrial," and Weston agrees that the music bears little similarity to the early industrial music. But he is not uncomfortable with the term and repeatedly uses it when discussing the music. One difference between Prayer Tower and some other electronic bands is the content of the lyrics, as Weston prefers to write more personal songs than make music "about the movie Blade Runner or whatever."
The debut Prayer Tower release was what Weston describes as a "really horrible" cover of "Warm Leatherette".
"The first single I did basically by myself, financed it and recorded in really cheap and cheesy studios and pumped out a white label and spawned some interest from that'" he explains. "I got some backers and at that point went and started working on the Halo album and released "Temptation" about a year and a half ago."
Released on CNG, "Temptation" proved to be the breakthrough for Prayer Tower. It garnered good response in Rockpool and Billboard and did well in Europe. At that point, labels starting showing interest and Weston settled on Third Mind. Halo hit the shelves earlier this year on that label. The album, produced by Greg Reely, contains "Temptation," as well as nine other virtually flawless electronic tracks. The CD edition adds remixes of four tracks.
Weston is a self-taught musician whose love for keyboards got him further and further into the realm of electronic music. Despite the industrial elements heard in Prayer Tower's music, Weston cites sound track and classical music as his biggest influences, adding that there aren't really any industrial bands that he's followed over the years. And while it is fairly common to musicians in this genre not to have any formal training, creating music has prompted Weston to educate himself further.
"I've gone back now and I've studied chord progressions and different classical training books and what not," he says. "I mean I would like to learn how to play classical piano better a lot than I do."
To create Prayer Tower's music, Weston usually starts off with a certain sound or sample that he will sketch out on the keyboard, though sometimes he will first come up with the rhythm or bass line. In the beginning, he tended to use a lot of factory pre-set sounds, but now all of the instrument voices are created and programmed from scratch or sampled and manipulated. Weston says that he "really enjoys" sampling and has been having a ball using cable TV as a source.
"It could be anything really, just off the television, the 80 different channels that we get here. It's just a wealth of stuff," he says "We've got shows now like 'Vision TV,' 24 hours of evangelists, you know like 'I did too many drugs when I was a kid.' And they're just great, and they have some really bad interview shows. I'll sit there with a tape in the VCR and I'll flip from channel to channel and just stop here and there and pick up the most bizarre things going through."
Weston doesn't feel that there is all that much difference between creating electronic and more traditional music, as he sees using a sequencer being no different from composing in a multi-track studio. "You come up with an idea and you're in a sense recording it, to the computer," he explains "A lot of people don't realize that. They think the computer magically writes the songs for the bands. If you talk to people who generally don't like electronic music too much, they're under the impression that you turn the computer on and you can go downstairs and make a cup of coffee, come back up and have a hit."
