Interview: Brooklyn Noise Legend J.G. Thirlwell Talks Reviving Steriod Maximus's Ectopia for Celebrate Brooklyn
Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.
Brooklynite J.G. Thirlwell is one of the unlikely highlights of this year's Celebrate Brooklyn series. The industrial living legend and genre-hopping nu-composition hero is lugging his manic 20-piece band to Prospect Park for a run-through of the brilliant Steroid Maximus album Ectopia. (He's also promised to add a few selections from his spasmodic soundtrack to TV's The Venture Brothers.) After spending the '80s as noise-clang pioneer Foetus, Thirlwell spent his second decade in the music industry under the occasional guise of Steroid Maximus, an outlet for wildly diverse instrumental music that crossed the lines of big band jazz, blaxploitation soundtracks, exotica, spy flicks and dissonant noisescapes. The wide-screen adventure Ectopia, released on Mike Patton's Ipecac label in 2002, ultimately led to Thirwell arranging its compositions for brass-and-string ensembles in L.A., France and Austria. At long last, it will get its New York debut. We called up Thirlwell to ask what took so damn long.![]()

























