As one of the groups featured in both the video game and movie Heavy Metal 2000 (a.k.a. Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2), you’d think the members of the industrial-rock band MDFMK would be overjoyed. After all, the original Heavy Metal soundtrack – which featured Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Devo, Cheap Trick, and Stevie Nicks – is considered as much a classic as the cult adult animated film, and, before its release this past summer, the soundtrack to the sequel was as highly anticipated as the new movie.

But if there’s one thing you can say about MDFMK’s Sascha Konietzko – who used to be the one-man-band KMFDM before he decided to form a band with sometime collaborator Tim Skold and ex-Drill singer Lucia Cifarelli – is that he’s not a guy who’s easily fazed. With a sense of humor dryer than a desert after a heat wave, and a demeanor that defines stoic, Sascha comes across somewhere between mellow and unconcerned. Which is why, when discussing how his band came to have their song “Missing Time” (which does not appear on their recent, self-titled first album) on the soundtrack to the new Heavy Metal movie and game, Sascha let his bandmates be enthusiastic for him. The MDFMK triumvirate recently sat down with GameSlice to discuss their contributions to the interactive entertainment industry.

How did you get involved with Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.2?

Sascha: They just called us up.

Tim: Yeah, I wish I had an exciting story for you.

Sascha: We’ve had a bunch of tracks on games here and there. Just two days ago we got a call about a racing game that wants to use the song “Rabble Rouser.” Some game where they’re on volume fifteen or something.

Tim: We just tend to do stuff that fits, for some reason.

Does Heavy Metal have any special significance for you, though? Because a number of the other bands involved are big fans of the first movie.

Sascha: No, it was more a money thing really.

Lucia: (laughs)

Tim: I was a fan of the movie, I loved the sh*t out of that thing. The scene with the bubbling crude and Black Sabbath’s “Mob Rules” – awww, that made me pee in my pants then. And it still does.

Whose decision was it to use the song “Missing Time”?

Tim: We just had this song that we thought was really good, but for some reason just did fit with the other stuff [on the album]. It didn’t stick out like a sore thumb, it just didn’t jell. And so when they called and asked if we had a song, we did.

Do you think the song might turn up on your next album?

Sascha: They wanted an exclusive track. So we said, “that’s going to cost twice as much,” and they said okay.

Tim: We knew we weren’t going to use it on our album.

Do you have a lot of extra songs that could be used in video games?

Sascha: Yeah. If you know of a good game company, give us their number. We’ll customize it, we’ll add guitar solos…. We even had a song that was used by a Spanish orange juice company that ran only in Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela, I think.

Do you guys play video games yourselves?

Lucia: I just like Riven, I don’t know if that counts.

Sascha: I play Wipeout and Wipeout XL. And that’s not because I’m a big fan of computer games, but because it’s purely therapeutic. At the end of the day…speed. And I have Doom and some other games, but whenever I run that stuff on my Macintosh, my music stuff gets all f*cked up, so I just stick with my PlayStation.

Tim (sarcastically): Games are bad, they make you all violent (laughs).

Sascha: I was also really into seeing what the guys at 3D Realms were going to come up with for this other game we were writing music for.

What happened to your contributions to Prey now that the game has been cancelled?

Sascha: We wrote a bunch of stuff for it…

Tim: …and we heard back, “This is amazing, this is great.” But then we heard that the game was scratched. Not that we care, we’re busy doing stuff.

Sascha: Though the stuff we wrote for them was as KMFDM.

Now you guys have been joking about how you’ll do this stuff for the money. But is it really the case, or do look at each game to make sure it’s something you want to be involved in?

Tim: Without a doubt. The only reason we signed on to the Prey thing was because we thought the game and the plot and the concept and even the engine they were writing looked really cool -- that’s why we got involved. If we had thought it sucked we wouldn’t have gotten involved. Not unless they paid us an obscene amount of money (laughs).

Since the game isn’t coming out, do you have any plans to use the music you wrote for it?

Sascha: It’s kind of hard to fathom that at this point because there’s not really an outlet to release anything KMFDM-ish, and that stuff is so different from MDFMK that the question would be, what do we even do with it? It would be more interesting to take the whole batch and use it in a similar way.

You mean use it for another video game?
Sascha: Yeah, use it in a movie or another game or something.

Tim: We did kick around the thought of making an album with the music for a game that never happened, but just as a goof.

Sascha: Well, the question is, who would put it out at this point? Some C-class label like Cleopatra?

So lastly, if you guys played a video game against each other, who do you think would win?

Lucia: Me!

Tim: Well Sascha and I would be trying to pull sounds off the game, so Lucia would probably win.

Lucia: I’d be concentrating on the game.

Sascha: I’ve never played against or with these guys, but I’d say Lucia would probably be the winner. I know I would be the loser for sure because I take a long time with them. Like when I play a flying game, I always fly and high up as I can and see where the game maxes out – I waste a lot of time with sh*t like that.

Tim: See, flying and driving doesn’t interest me. If there’s bludgeoning and murder and mayhem, I’ll play that.

Sascha: Oh behave.