Devin Townsend Offers Update on Planned $10 Million Symphony About Penises and Vaginas
This past January, Noisey published an in-depth interview with Devin Townsend in which the mad metal genius spoke on all manner of topics, the most headline-grabbing of which was this: he’s planning to write and record an extravagant symphony about “dicks and vaginas and death” titled The Moth, and he feels he needs roughly $10 million to do it right. An eccentric concept to be sure (to say the least), but this is Devin Townsend we’re talking about.
Earlier this month Devin brought the project back to the top of fans’ minds with the following Instagram post:
And now we’ve finally got a real update on the project via an interview with Allschools Magazine, in which Devin elaborates a bit on the concept:
“‘The Moth’ is a project that I think I’m gonna do next. And typically how I work is I go between an album that has some sort of commercial potential, like Transcendence, where it sounds like what I do and it’s sonically in line with what’s cool, or whatever. And I do like it. And each time I do a record like that the career goes up. But then I get bored and want to do something else. So ‘The Moth’ is something else that comes next. Which is essentially an opera, I guess. You know, a symphony, a choir, and a theme that is… I’d say provocative on some level, but not intentionally so. It seems like it’s something that I would really enjoy doing creatively. I’m in the formative stages of it at this point.
“So the parameters of what it is and what it isn’t hasn’t been defined yet, but I’m hoping hat it’s something we could do like a Broadway style play, with a lot of projection mapping. But there’s a good possibility that it could end up being a graphic novel, so we’ll see.”
Commenting on the Instagram post specifically, Townsend offered:
“It describes humanity. It’s like everything is power. It’s like every bit of power that we’re trying to accumulate comes back to procreation on some level. So all the political, religious cockfighting is literally that. It’s like typically men with issues about their penis all connected ultimately to sex, and power. And ultimately sex is maybe some sort of analogy for connection to something that’s divine. It’s procreation and it’s love. And it’s all these things as well. But I think there’s also an aspect of that that is taken for granted. And a lot of the times, maybe even if it’s not directly related to sex, maybe power is so biologically tied to that.
“It seems like when I see politicians making such grotesque statements a lot of the times I think to myself… I wonder how much of that is like connection to your parents, or connection to childhood, or maybe you got a small penis. Or maybe it’s like you’ve been so desperately trying to get affection, maybe you didn’t get it from your parents and it becomes sort of conquest. You know, sex and love becomes separated. I don’t know, but I think a lot of the times when it comes to making music or art, or whatever you want to call it, I just kind of have fun taking guesses at things. So ‘The Moth’ is another example of that.”
So: this thing is on. It’s going to happen.
We can’t fucking wait.
[via Ultimate Guitar]
