Corgan: “I’ve already talked to Flood” about the ‘Machina’ reissue 12:42 pm // Thursday, April 26, 2012

David Swan of Australian live music site Faster Louder has released a new interview with Smashing Pumpkins head Billy Corgan. Corgan discusses topics including his in-progress memoir, recording music with his love interests, the legacy of Zeitgeist, and the themes of the Pumpkins’ upcoming album Oceania.

Swan queried Corgan about the status of the upcoming Machina reissues:

Machina II is a brilliant album, have you ever thought about releasing it properly, maybe when you re-issue the others?
Yes. Our sell-out move, for Machina, is we’re going to remix the whole record and put it in its official sequence the way I’d hoped for in the beginning. I wrote it as a rock opera double album type of thing, so we’re going to remix the whole thing. I’ve already talked to Flood, and he’s been indicating he wants to be involved with that part of the process, and then we’ll finally finish the album, the way it was meant to be.

On how to describe different eras of Pumpkins music:

Is the sound [of Oceania] a new direction for you or is it harking back to earlier stuff?
I can describe what people are saying, but I don’t really get into the sonic part because every time I say anything like that it turns into like a ‘oh, we made this kind of album’. How I describe my music never seems to be the way people hear it. I was listening today to a couple of old songs because we’re getting ready for the tour, just to see if I wanted to play them live, and a song I listened to was the song we did called G.L.O.W. And G.L.O.W. to me sounds like it could have easily been Mellon Collie, it sounds like it could’ve been on Machina, and yet because a lot of people didn’t like the Zeitgeist period it just sorta automatically got lumped into something that it wasn’t. And I was surprised, going back and listening to G.L.O.W. today, like ‘Wow, this actually kinda sounds like classic Smashing Pumpkins to me.’ But my opinion doesn’t seem to matter in those things because people seem to need to make periods about something other than what it actually is. So if I play heavy guitar music with certain people in the room it sounds like this, but if I make the same type of music with other people in the room, it sounds like this.